XIV

RHETORIC AND CHRISTIANITY

Daemonum cibus est carmina poetarum, saecularis sapientia, rhetoricorum pompa verborum.

St Jerome, Epistulae 21.13

IN A famous passage in one of his letters St Jerome tells how when he was on his way to Jerusalem to adopt the life of an ascetic he found it impossible to do without his library. Fasting and penance alternated with the reading of Cicero and Plautus, and when he took up the prophets he was disgusted by their style. Then he fell ill, and in a feverish dream seemed to be brought before the seat of judgment. Asked to give an account of himself he replied: ‘I am a Christian.’ ‘You lie’, answered the judge. ‘You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where your heart is, there shall your treasure be.’ ‘I was silent at once’, Jerome goes on, ‘and amid my stripes (for he had ordered me to be beaten) I was even more tortured by the burning of my conscience…. Finally those present threw themselves at the feet of the judge and besought him to make allowances for youth and to allow time for penitence to the sinner, punishing me thereafter if I should ever read the books of the Gentiles again. And I who at this moment of crisis would have promised even more, began to swear an oath: “Lord, if ever I possess or read secular books, I shall have denied thee.”’¹

St Jerome’s dream gives a vivid picture of the conflict between the new religion and the old learning. Christianity demanded a whole-hearted allegiance which left no room for Cicero and the poets. The old literary and rhetorical education by which many generations had been brought up on the study of the classical authors and the practice of fine writing and effective speaking, was subjected to a new and powerful threat.

In a sense, perhaps, the conflict was not a new thing, but only a revival in a new form of an old conflict. Plato had expelled the poets from his ideal state. Marcus Aurelius had turned away from rhetoric to philosophy. Many of the criticisms which the Christians directed against pagan culture had been made before by the philosophers. None the less Christianity presented a challenge to traditional culture that was both stronger than, and different in character from, that offered by philosophy. For the philosophers belonged to the Greco- Roman world, whereas Christianity came in a sense from outside. The Christians brought with them not only certain religious and ethical ideals by comparison only weakly represented in the Greco-Roman tradition; they also brought with them their sacred books. The Christian priest was not, like the priest of the mystery religions, a mere performer of a ritual; he was teacher and preacher. Thus he had to be an educated man, but an educated man in a new sense, learned not in the poets and prose writers of Greece and Rome, but in the Scriptures. Christianity was not only a religion competing with a culture; it was itself a new culture.

The existence of the Bible and its supreme importance for Christians sharpened the conflict with pagan culture. The Englishman brought up on the Authorised Version is accustomed to regard the Bible as a literary masterpiece; the Roman brought up on Cicero thought far otherwise. The earliest Latin translations of the Bible were unpretentious unskilful versions, which in their anxious desire to represent the original literally often departed from correct Latin usage.² They were an inevitable stumbling-block to the educated man. Augustine in his early days found them unworthy to be compared with Cicero;³ Jerome, as we have seen, was disgusted by the style of the Old Testament prophets. The main cause, according to Lactantius, of the failure of the Scriptures to convince the educated was that the prophets wrote in ordinary simple language and were therefore despised by those ‘who will not listen to or read anything which is not polished and eloquent, and will allow nothing to enter their hearts which does not charm the ears with its pleasing sound’.⁴

Yet though rhetoric and Christianity might thus come into conflict, there was a sense in which Christianity can be called a rhetorical religion. The massive works of the Latin Fathers show us that a Christian leader in the early centuries was a writer and speaker, teacher, controversialist, letter writer, preacher, one who used to the full the written and spoken word. The Fathers did all this as a matter of course; they had been brought up in the pagan schools, had in many cases taught rhetoric. They had learnt the art of persuasion and self-expression, and this art they used to the full in the service of their religion.⁵

This is not the place for a full study of the relations between Christianity and classical culture. Rhetoric was only a part of that culture, and not the part which was most open to attack.⁶ It will suffice here to confine ourselves to the greatest of the Latin Christian writers, St Augustine, and to outline his attitude to the rhetoric to which he had been brought up, and which he taught with distinction until the time of his conversion.⁷

As Augustine looks back on his education, whose sole aim was to make him a good speaker, he is struck by its futility and neglect of essentials. His models were men who were confounded when they uttered a solecism; they would pride themselves on the beauties of their style even if the subject were their own vices. They observed with care the laws of letters and syllables handed down to them from previous speakers, while neglecting the laws of eternal salvation.⁸ Not only were these studies vain; they were also dishonest. Not so by the ordinary standards of the day. ‘In all innocence I taught my pupils crafty tricks, not to enable them to secure the death of an innocent man, but on occasion to acquit a guilty one.’⁹ This was the traditional morality of rhetoric. It was not good enough for a Christian. To Augustine the whole rhetorical system was bound up with dishonesty. The greater the deceit the more the praise.¹⁰ Rhetoric was ‘mendacious folly’, oratory ‘wordy and polished falsehood’.¹¹

Moreover the rhetorical education was aimed solely at worldly success. The object of his parents, says Augustine, was that he should be successful in this world and excel in the art of speech which ministers to human honour and false riches.¹² He himself for long accepted these values, and while at Milan was still greedy for success and gain.¹³ But as a Christian he rejected worldly success. ‘Why did you go to school?’ he asks in one of his later works, and he answers: ‘To gain money or to attain to honour and to the heights of esteem. But what you learned with such pains and punishments is a mortal thing, as are you yourself and as is the aim of your learning.’¹⁴ And rhetoric, as well as being directed towards a vain end, encouraged an attitude far removed from Christian humility. ‘I studied the authorities on rhetoric’, writes Augustine, ‘…and desired to excel therein, an aim leading to damnation and puffed up with the joys of human vanity.’¹⁵ Writing of the period shortly after his conversion, when he retired to Cassiciacum, he refers to his writings of that period as ‘still breathing the pride of the schools’.¹⁶

So much for Augustine’s criticisms of rhetoric. But he was not content with mere criticism. He was aware that rhetoric had its uses, and in his later life, when he was now fully committed to the Christian life and doctrine, he set himself to produce a new theory of rhetoric adapted to the needs of the Christian teacher.¹⁷ The De Doctrina Christiana is a treatise on the uses of the Scriptures; the subject is divided into two parts, firstly how to understand them and secondly how to communicate to others the fruits of one’s understanding. The second part, which is treated in the fourth book, may be described as a Christian Ars Rhetorica, or better, a Christian De Oratore, for the work has more in common with Cicero than with the scholastic tradition.¹⁸

The tone is serene and uncontroversial. There is no hostility to rhetoric, which is recognised to be not without its uses. ‘It is true that the art of rhetoric is used for the purpose of commending both truth and falsehood, yet who would venture to say that truth should remain defenceless in the hands of its champions…? The faculty of eloquence is something neutral, which has great persuasive effect whether for good or for evil; why then should not the good acquire it for use in the championship of truth, if the bad use it to win their perverse and vain causes in the interests of wickedness and error?’¹⁹ Or, as he says elsewhere, ‘The rules of rhetoric are none the less true, although they can be used in the interests of falsehood; but because they can also be used in the interests of truth, rhetorical skill is not in itself to be blamed, but rather the perversity of those who misuse it.’²⁰

Augustine disclaims any intention of writing an art of rhetoric as it was taught in the schools; that can be learned elsewhere, by those that have the time.²¹ It is unnecessary for those who have not learned the rules when young to spend time over them. Natural genius combined with reading, listening and practice will more easily produce eloquence than an attention to rules. Good speakers who know the rules seldom make use of them when speaking; their speeches may be in accordance with rhetorical doctrine, but this can be the case even when they have not learned the doctrine. Rules do not make eloquence; they derive from eloquence.²²

This last remark can be paralleled from Cicero’s De Oratore.²³ From Cicero, too, Augustine derives his doctrine of the three aims of the orator, to instruct, to please and to win over.²⁴ For him, however, the first is the most important, and he finds it necessary to give a warning against paying too much attention to giving pleasure. ‘A serious-minded audience will not find pleasure in that sweetness which, while it does not speak of wicked things, adorns slight and trivial goods with a frothy parade of words.’²⁵ The ornamental eloquence of the Second Sophistic was not unknown even in the Fathers of the Church, and Augustine quotes a passage from Cyprian which he condemns, not without reason, for its excessive profusion.²⁶

Augustine also follows Cicero in connecting the three purposes of the orator with the three styles, the plain, the middle or mixed and the grand.²⁷ It is true that the ecclesiastical orator always deals with great themes, but they need not always be handled in the grand style. When he instructs, his style is plain; when he uses praise or blame it is mixed; when he wishes to rouse to action, then he will bring the grand style into play.²⁸ On the other hand it is a mistake to connect the three aims of the orator too closely with the three styles; he should as far as possible fulfil all three aims even when using only one of the three styles. When we speak plainly we wish to be heard willingly and to ensure obedience, and simple explanation and argument, especially when it has a natural unsought charm, often arouses such applause that it hardly seems to be the plain style. So with the other two styles. Pleasure may be the chief aim of the mixed style, but the speaker wishes to be understood and obeyed also; and in the grand style persuasion cannot be achieved unless the speaker is understood and heard with pleasure.²⁹ Finally Augustine emphasises that the speaker’s life is more influential than his words, however eloquent they may be. This is the old doctrine of ethos, which naturally and rightly assumes a new importance when the orator is transformed to a religious and moral teacher.³⁰

So far Augustine follows Ciceronian doctrine. But the differences from Cicero are as remarkable as the resemblances. Augustine has freed himself more completely than Cicero ever did from the school tradition, and more than Cicero he emphasises the supreme importance of clarity and truth.³¹ Moreover Augustine’s orator is a very different person from Cicero’s; he is not the orator of the forum and the senate house, but the interpreter of the Scriptures and the defender of the faith.³² He is thus a sort of combination of the grammaticus, the philosopher and the orator of the pagan world. He studies his texts like the grammaticus, he teaches his doctrine like the philosopher and he persuades his hearers like the orator. His texts are of course the Scriptures, and this brings Augustine up against the question whether eloquence is to be found in the sacred writings. His answer is interesting. We have seen how many saw in them nothing but uncouthness. Augustine finds in the sacred authors an eloquence of their own, one which does not avoid the methods of rhetoric, but does not consciously make use of them. The words are not a detachable ornament, but arise spontaneously from the matter.³³ None the less he cannot forbear to point out that even judged by the traditional standards of pagan literature, there is eloquence in the Christian authors.³⁴ He quotes from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans an example of a climax (in the rhetorical sense of the word) and of and followed by a period,³⁵ and a longer passage from the first Epistle to the Corinthians, the structure of which he carefully analyses.³⁶ Even the prophets, whose style Jerome had found so distressing, provide him with an example of eloquence in a passage of Amos, of which he triumphantly asks: ‘Would those who priding themselves on their learning and eloquence despise our prophets as unlearned and ignorant of style, have desired to express themselves otherwise if they had had to say something of this sort?’³⁷ Thus the Scriptures were vindicated. Only in one respect is Augustine a trifle apologetic; he has to admit that they are lacking in rhythmical clausulae.³⁸

In pointing to the formal beauties of scriptural passages Augustine seems to be accepting the standards of pagan culture, and bringing the biblical writings as it were into the canon of stylistic models accepted by the secular tradition. But this was not his purpose. It is clear that for him the Scriptures are to take the place of the pagan writers. The cultural background of the Christian teacher is to be completely different from that of the pagan. The Scriptures and the Christian Fathers provide the models to be studied and imitated,³⁹ and if any non-Christian writers are to be studied, it is only to assist in understanding the Scriptures. Pagan learning is of use, so far as it is not connected with falsehood and superstition,⁴⁰ but its usefulness is very limited. It is small compared with the learning of the Scriptures. ‘Whatever a man has learned outside is, if it is harmful, condemned in the Scriptures; if it is useful, it is found in them.’⁴¹

Augustine might draw up a programme of Christian studies, but he did not establish a Christian educational system. The pagan schools of literature and rhetoric continued to function until the disruption of ancient society by the barbarians. Christians sent their sons to them, because there were no other schools;⁴² they even taught in them themselves, as is shown by the fact that Julian tried to exclude them from the teaching profession. Nor, it seems, did they attempt to reform the schools from within; Julian’s objection to them was the negative one that they did not believe what they taught and that they did not honour the gods honoured by the authors they expounded.⁴³ Christian teachers went on with the old curriculum, and they do not seem to have attempted to modify it at all in the interests of their religion.⁴⁴ A Christian rhetorician in his capacity of rhetorician would differ little if at all from a pagan one. Victorinus did not consider it necessary to resign from his chair of rhetoric at Rome on his conversion, and he presumably went on giving the same lectures after as before his change of religion.

Thus rhetoric remained part of the cultural background of the educated Christian, and not only of nominal Christians like Ausonius, but even of those who adopted the new faith without reserve. A letter to Augustine of the year 412 gives us a picture of a group of educated Christians engaged in intellectual discussion. We find them beginning with questions of rhetorical theory and technique on traditional lines. They pass on to poetry and philosophy, and were it not that they end up with theology, they might well be a group of pagan men of learning.⁴⁵ The old tradition was too strong for any radical change to take place in society as a whole.

We have to pass on to the very end of ancient civilisation before we find any attempt made to found a Christian system of education. In the sixth century Cassiodorus observed that whereas the study of secular writers flourished—for the public schools of literature and rhetoric still survived under Theodoric⁴⁶—there was no public teaching of the Scriptures, and proposed the setting up of Christian schools, ‘from which the soul could attain to everlasting salvation and the tongue of the faithful be adorned with a chaste eloquence’.⁴⁷ The disturbances of the times prevented the fulfilment of this design. Later, however, when he retired to the monastery of Vivarium Cassiodorus compiled, to guide his monks in their studies, an encyclopaedia of sacred and secular learning, the Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum. Among the secular arts which he summarises is rhetoric; even in the monastic life, which might seem the very antithesis of the rhetorical ideal, something of the old secular tradition was allowed to survive. Cassiodorus even discovers that certain aspects of the art of rhetoric—memory, delivery and voice production—have their uses for the monk.⁴⁸ But apart from this, he regards rhetoric, like the other arts, as strictly subordinate to sacred studies and justified only by its usefulness in explaining the Scriptures.⁴⁹ In this way the art of rhetoric, shrunk to a meagre summary and reduced to one of a number of arts ancillary to the study of the Scriptures, found a place in monastic studies.

Cassiodorus through his Institutiones has an important place in history as one of the channels through which classical learning was passed on to the Middle Ages. In another way, too, he marks the transition to the new society. In his earlier life he was quaestor to Theodoric, and under an Ostrogothic king a quaestor’s duty was to draft official documents. Cassiodorus in this capacity sees himself as the embodiment of the Ciceronian ideal orator.⁵⁰ Rhetoric had become what it was to be to a large extent in the Middle Ages, the art of writing letters. The orator has developed into the civil servant.

While Cassiodorus looks forward to the future, an older contemporary of his, Ennodius, looks back to the past, and it is with him as the last representative of the secular tradition that we may suitably end this survey. Born in Gaul, he studied in Italy, and was bishop of Pavia from 511 to his death in 521. His clerical calling did not prevent him from pursuing pagan letters and pagan rhetoric,⁵¹ and we find among his works declamations in the old school tradition. There are Dictiones Ethicae, imaginary speeches of mythological characters,⁵² and controversiae, in which the familiar figures of declamation, the stepmother, the tyrant and the disinherited son, make their last appearance. One of the declamations⁵³ is on a theme also found in the Greater Declamations, and Ennodius, with apologies for his presumption, takes the opposite side to that taken in the Quintilianic declamation. Thus the old tradition of declamation survived almost without change from Augustus to the Ostrogothic kingdom.⁵⁴

Ennodius’s works also include a curious letter of instruction to two young friends, in which Modesty, Chastity and Faith are somewhat incongruously combined with Grammar and Rhetoric, and each in turn is made to speak to the young men.⁵⁵ Rhetoric advances all her old high-flown claims, first in prose, then in some lines of verse of which the following is a translation.

He whom I take in charge unscathed remains,
It is my art that blots out all life’s stains.
The man of spotless fame I can compel
All to acknowledge sprung from darkest hell.
My lips can ruin and my lips can save;

My words draw judgment captive and a slave.
Jewels, fine wool, pride of Tarentum’s town,
And power, are brought to nothing by my frown.
Dominion o’er the world my precepts bring;
My art fears nothing; with its aid I’m king.

The words sound like an echo from the distant past. They recall the age of the sophists, with its proud proclamation of the power of words. But power had long ago passed from the orator to the man of arms. Rhetoric as statesmanship was dead; rhetoric as persuasion was dead too, for a rhetorician like Ennodius had nothing worth saying to say, nothing of which to persuade his hearers. There remained only rhetoric as the art of words, a laboured and feeble art by now, but faintly preserving, in an age that cared little for such things, something of the old Greek love of beauty.