Podcasts about ciceronian

On Christian Teaching   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movement that have shaped rhetorical history. Big thanks to the University of Texas’ Humanities Media Project for supporting the podcast.   Today we get to talk about the saint who brought classical rhetoric into the realm of Christian homiletics. Augustine was a fourth century saint whose life in someways demonstrates the great sea-changes in the Mediterranean world of rhetoric, education and religion. His father was pagan, his mother was Christian and young Augustine describes himself as a bit of a genius hedonist in his Confessions. His teachers were supposedly terrible, but he mastered the standards of a Roman education—Virgil and Cicero. He eventually became a rhetoric teacher in Carthage, Rome and Milan. He taught rhetoric all told for somewhere between ten and fifteen years, before his eventual conversion to Christianity and vocation as a priest and the bishop of Hippo. He must have spent a lot of time pondering the question of how his previous career as one who taught other people how to persuade could be reconciled with his new religion’s emphasis on inspiration. If God will give the preacher exactly the words which he needs, either through scripture or through divine inspiration, is there any space for a Christian rhetoric? He started working on his definition of Christian rhetoric as early as the 390s, but On Christian Teaching wasn’t finished until 427, only three years before his death. Throughout those forty years, Augustine must have thought about the practical question of whether Christian preachers could be trained to give better sermons, much as he had spent more than a decade teaching young men in the principles secular rhetoric.   The first argument that Augustine has to make is that Christian teaching can be rhetorical. Rhetoric was seen as pagan and more than a little sneaky. Augustine argues that rhetoric may be used by Christians as a means of spoiling of Egypt to adorn the temples of Jerusalem (Green’s 64-7). The biblical allusion he’s making comes from the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt who took pagan gold with them to make their own religious items. Augustine’s metaphor implies that rhetoric, like the gold itself, is valuable, but it must be melted down and essentialized from its current pagan form. Augustine goes on to argue that Christians not only benefit from using rhetoric, but they avoid rhetoric at their own peril. Because “rhetoric is used to give conviction to both truth and falsehood” why should truth “stand unarmed in the fight against falsehood” (101)? So Augustine argues that rhetoric has both positive and defensive value, but as part of the melting down of the pagan gold idols, he recommends several key differences from classical rhetoric.   First, the similarities: there’s a lot that Augustine believes that the Christian can be taught about oratory, especially he classical idea of the three levels of speaking, high, middle and plain. He is very willing to steal the gold, also, of the three aims of the orator, to instrut, delight and move, which Augustine calls “to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure and with obedience” (87). Even the methods of instruction can be taken from the pagan rhetors. Imitation looms large, except more Paul, perhaps, and less Cicero. Augustine sees the bible as not just source material, but examplars. This is a very Classical way of teaching style. Augustine’s destinction between “things” (the content) and “signs” (the proclaimation of the content) is itself a very classical distinction. Augustine’s “Egyptian gold” seems to be of a very Platonic and Ciceronian ore, but he does melt it down to reform it into a more Christian shape through two important moves.     First, Augustine puts a heavy emphasis on the ethos of the speaker. Classical rhetoric, too, especially Cicero, who Augustine read, valued ethos, but for Augustine, the character of the preacher is important for practical as well as theological reasons. Augustine demands that the speaker live a good life and be in companionship with the inspiration of the Spirit of God. While Augustine admits that “A wise and eloquent speaker who lives a wicked life certainly educates many who are eager to learn, although he is useless to his own soul,” he believes that the speaker in front on an audience should, in the best case, be the best sort of man (142). The speaker who is a good person can teach through acts as well as through words. By living lives that were beyond reproach, the preachers who follow Augustine “benefit far more people if they practiced what they preached” (143). This follows Paul’s injunction to his own teacher-in-training, Timothy, when he says about bishops that they “must have a good report of them which are without” (1 Tim. 3:7). The people outside of the church as well as in, would be best to have a good example teaching them               But for Augustine, it’s not enough just to live a moral life—pagan Stoics and Epicureans can similarly follow rules they have made for themselves. Augustine also says that the preacher needs to pray and receive the Holy Ghost’s instruction. The preacher needs to pray in preparation “praying for himself and for those he is about to address” (121). He needs the prayer in order to be able to be an instrument of the Spirit and the audience need the prayer so they can be receptive to the message. The preacher gets the truth of the subject as well as the delivery from the prayer. As a vessel fro the truth the preacher prays so he “can utter what he had drunk in and pour out what has filled him” (121). Augustine even goes as far as to say of the preacher that “he derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory” (121). The idea behind this is that eloquence can come as does inspiration to speak the right thing—from the inspiration of the Spirit. Augustine even goes as far as to say of the preacher that “he derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory” (121). This idea that the preacher can appeal to divine eloquence instead of considering the rhetorical situation has made several 20th century scholars frustrated with Augustine. Kenneth Burke complains in Rhetoric of Motives that Augustine seeks “cajoling of an audience [not] routing of opponents.” I don’t pretend to know every Burke means, but that seems like a bit of an unfair argument because Augustine spends most of his time describing homiletics, a genre that operates on the assumption that the speaker and the audience are already in agreement on most of the key principles, if not the application and degree. Once they’ve put on the stiff suit, or itchy nylons and are sitting on the hard-backed pews at an unreasonable hour of a Sunday morning, you’ve already won a large part of the battle. Your audience is probably less diametrically opposed to you than would be, say, the senate in a legislative speech or the jury in a judicial speech. Stanley Fish objects that that Augstine’s dependence on spirit depreciates the speaker, which is actually a very old argument against Christian homiletics. In the Renaissance, rhetoric was a scary idea in general and we’ll talk about Wayne Rebhorn’s books about rhetoric debates later, but the key thing is that Augustine along with his critics had to deal with how rhetoric fits into one of the key Christian paradoxes: that men are both “little lower than the angels” and also “less than the dust of the earth.” Fish is right that Augustine’s reliance on spirit depreciates the agency of the speaker, but he neglects that for Augustine the steps necessary to receive the spirit—obedience and prayer—are responsibilities of the speaker, as necessary to a Christian canon of rhetoric as invention and arrangement. And it’s not just a Christian rhetoric that Augustine is describing here: it’s a neo-Platonic one. Plato’s influence is seen all over On Christian Doctrine. You might not remember from our episode on the Pheadrus, but Plato believed that eternal truths about, for example, beauty could be “remembered” in this world. What we are remembering are the glimpses of truth that we were able to see in a spirit world where we were able to control our rash desires. In other words, when we were obedient to our better selves. Augustine was a big fan of Plato, but as a rhetorician, he probably liked the pro-rhetoric Plato best. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine seeks a way to reconcile his neo-Platonist philosophy, Christianity and the idea that good preaching is a skill that can be teachable and improved. In the turn of the fourth century, Augustine witnessed both the 410 sack of Rome and the 430 Vandal invasion of Hippo, his own home. He lived right on the boundary between the end of the old, Roman Mediterranean world and the rise of the Christian European one. In all of the tumultuous change that was about to begin, Augustine recommended adaption, not revolution, as Christians reused the best rhetorical practices of the pagan world to build their new era.          

Sometimes I make a podcast and I think, “Golly I hope I did justice by that idea, person and movement that shaped rhetorical history.” Sometimes I make a podcast on the work of someone living, like Scott Stroud’s book about John Dewey, and sometimes I make a podcast on someone dead, like Kant. If I misrepresent a dead person, who will stop me? A living one. today, on Mere rhetoric, not exactly a retraction, but a revision of a previous episode on Immanual Kant, the philosopher who has been long-identified, including by me, as diametrically opposed to the field of rhetoric. Scott Stroud’s Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, today on Mere Rhetoric.   Intro music   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, specially thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas for their support in making these new episodes both possible and awesome. Also thanks to Jacob in the booth, and Scott Stroud, also of the University of Texas. I emailed Dr. Stroud when I talked about his book in the Dewey episodes, and he told me he was working on a book on Kant that may change my opinion on him. Alright, I thought, let’s hear it.   And I did. Stroud wrote a few articles about Kant’s views of education which suggested that there may be a rhetoric of Kant after all, and they piqued my interest to the point when I was ready to jump on this book when it released.   Essentially Stroud argues that Kant didn’t hate rhetoric as much as we think so, which is pretty high because Kant says things like, “Man, I hate rhetoric.” Stroud even points out that Kant turned down a position as professor of poetry even though he wanted “academic advancement and funds” (4), just because he seemed to dislike linguistic fla-dee-la. But it’s possible that some of Kant’s antipathy towards rhetoric is just antipathy towards a certain kind of rhetoric.   Kant’s frienemy, Christian Garves, was a loud-and-proud Ciceronian, which criticized Kant openly and behind anonymity. “Kant rejected this way of doing philosophy,” Stroud writes “and in doing so, rejected the notion of rhetoric that appeared connected to it in practice” (23). He hated the idea of all the self-interest inherent in Garves’ understanding of rhetoric, felt like it was categorically opposed to the categorical imperative: that any action you undertake could be a universal law. Remember when your mom would catch you littering or picking the neighbors’ flowers and ask, “What if everyone did that? What would happen then?” That’s essentially the mom version of the categorial imperative.   But rhetoric isn’t about universals. It’s not about telling people to do things that are applicable to everyone in every situation--it’s hopelessly conditional. Garston in Saving Persausion, another book we’ve talked about on the podcast, banishes Kant from the world of rhetoric because he loved universals so much. Stroud responds to GArston’s complaints. “Rhetorical message are primarily not universal, since few things relevant to pressing decisions in the present are of such general scope,” he admits “Yet Kant’s philosophy seems to demand that practices be universalizable.” (187) The detachment usually described as a condition of scholarly logic is actually “an orientational or dispositional feature as as such is applicable to all forms of communicative activity” (189)  There are things that are universalizable in how we do rhetoric, even if each instance of rhetoric may be specific to its moment of kairos. As Stroud says, “Kant did not insist that a reason be a reason for every potential listener; he does seem to insist, however, that it be a reason for everyone in a comparable situation” (190).   Okay, that’s all well and good, but what about the fact that Kant pretty much straight out says, “Do you know what I hate? rhetoric. I really hate that field. Ugh.”? Well, first off, that’s paraphrase, but secondly, it’s also translation. There are multiple words that could be translated as rhetoric. Even in English, we have rhetoric and eloquence and persausion and all sorts of words that fan out like a Vann diagram with overlapping meanings. Some of the terms are manipulative, but not all. “clearly, the larger genus of ‘skilled speaking’ or elequence is re (42)levent to Kant’s moral project.” stroud says, but “If one honors the complexity of the phenomena of human communication and the range of terms being used by Kant, one can conceptualize rhetoric simply as the persuasive use of language in community with others “ (43). And that’s something that Kant can get behind Okay, so if we accept that Kant doesn’t have a deep abiding hatred for all things communication, what would a Kantian rhetoric look like? Building fromKant’s philosophy, what if he had taken that poetry job? what would he have said to the writers in his class? That’s the second task that Stroud takes, after his resuscitation of Kant into the field of rhetoric. Or as he himself puts it: “what sense of such rhetorical action are enjoined by Kant’s complex thought on morality, religion, politics, aesthetics, and education? Taking ‘rhetoric’ not as a simple term but as a complex concept, what uses or forms of rhetorical activity fit into Kant’s mature thought, especially the important topic of moral and the formation of the ideal sort of human community?” (7).   There are two venues where Kant’s ideal human community really comes out: education and religion. Both are troublesome to the fundamental question of rhetoric for Kant: how can you honor someone’s autonomy and their freedom and still try to change them? Kant hated manipulation, but you wouldn’t necessarily say that fourth-graders and manipulated into learning long division or state capitals, and you don’t even need to say that they’re manipulated in learning how to share, cooperate and treat others with respect.   Stroud points out that “Kant is notably hostile to rhetoric, but only one version of it--that of persuasive speech used with an orientation toward selfish and manipulative use of one’s social skill. Avoiding such an orientation is the primary aim of education” (106). Part of Kant’s ideal community is that people learn to do the right thing for the right reason. Maybe they can be constrained in the kingdom of right, but in the ideal kingdom of ends, people all do the right thing collectively because they are committed to it individually. Learning how to commit is the object of education.   The most moral way to teach people--especially young people--how to develop the internal discipline to choose the right thing instead of the selfish thing is to present them with lots of good examples. Examples don’t threaten or bully, but present themselves to autonomous agents who can decide for themselves how to interpret the actions and consequences. But since the internal state is key for Kantian ethics, the internal state of the example has to be part of the story. Using examples, especially as a way to teach, uses hypothetical about internal motives for making the choice. “They are, in an important sense, unreal and fictional” (116), even when actual and historical. Take the story of Washington at Valley Forge. If you tell kids that Washington persisted because he believed in the promise of our country, you will forge patriots. If you tell them that he endured because he thought he would wind up on people’s currency you create mercenaries. So in this sense, examples are always fictions of the people who tell them.   Let’s lay aside education and stories for a moment and turn to religion. Religion, too, involves a lot of stories and examples, but it also lets people participate in self-denying actions like prayer, especially traditional, public, set prayers.  When you’re reciting along with other people, you can’t express your inter state as much as alter it to match up with everyone else and the traditional prayer. Praying “forgive us our debts as we forgive our tresspassers” reminds you to be forgiving, even if your inclination is otherwise. Devotees who all gather together, in person or world wide, to say “as we forgive our trespassers” form an “invisible church”: a group of people who all have accepted the same internal conditions together. As Stroud explains it: “the invisible church is the ideal ethical community that we ought to aspire to form--a community that encompasses all agents who are members of it by virtue of their willing of the moral law over the incentives of inclination” (144). As opposed to a nation or a family, these community members opted in because of something they all agreed to believe internally together.   finally Stroud turns to the hardest sell: Kant as political rhetorician. He describes how rhetorical critics (those listening to rhetoric) and critical rhetors (those producing rhetoric) can do so most ethically. there are a lot of lists here, so get out your pens and paper.   So manipulative rhetoric has three characteristics: For Kant, manipulative rhetoric can be seen to have 3 characteristics 1-inequality of knowledge, between speaker and audience 2- this sort of rhetoric exerts a causal force on its listeners. “How rhetoric can treat humans as inherently valuable rational beings, or as machines with causality” (44), 3- idiosyncrasy of the goals of this rhetoric--private own goals. (44)   Non manipulative rhetorics have their own list of four characterstics 1- domain-specific concepts and knowledge--somthing to talk about 2- uses what Kant calls “lively presentations” especially through examples (44-5) 3- nonmanipulative rhetoic doesn’t violate respectability in language and “respect for the various parties in the interaction” (45) 4- public goals or transitive across agents (45)   Above all, you are to treat your audience as though it were comprised of autonomous individuals, not elements of the environment that can be manipulated. The best critical rhetors, “ should see the process of public testing as a way to optimize beliefs,” says Stroud, “including their own views. This quest implicates them in using second-personal reasons in an effort to con (214) vince others that the grounds for their views are sufficient subjectively and objectively. Seeing one’s audience as mere causal objects, however, inclines one to find the right utterances to say to move them as causal objects” (215) “Seeing people as part of the natural world is a vital step in using or manipulating them as a mere means, since this conceptualization of a person as an object with predictable causal interaction with other natural objects is a vital starting point to intelligently using them for some contingent purpose” (218).   And when you’re taking in the rhetoric, you similarly must abide by a set of standards:   Rules of criticism always treat the rhetor being studied or listened to as an equal always consider the utterance or object of study as at least a bearer of truth claims and second-person reasons. Do not make casual explanations exclusionary of attributions of dignity to a rhetor Do not believe that your criticism of such utterances is certain or exclusive of alternative readings (229) All of this is pretty life-affirming, and I have to admit that I was moved by Stroud’s (and Kant’s) description of the ideal world of rhetoric, just as I was at the end of his text on Dewey. In fact, I’m going to let Stroud have the last word because he puts the ideal in such a clear way.   “thus, Kant answers the ‘Q question’ [need the rhetor be moral] with a nuance reply--a moral agent may not necessarily be eloquent, but the most complete agent is perfected in pragmatic and moral ways. The complete agent is both a morally good person and person who possess the capacity to speak well” (234). outro

Can you imagine reading a book and your life changing drastically? For St. Jerome, from Ciceronian to a Christian, from Rome bureaucracy to desert asceticism, St. Athanasius’ book on St. Anthony did just that. What did not change for St. Jerome, however, was his gift for languages, a gift we still benefit from today. Discover with Catholic Bytes just why we have to thank this 4th century language master.