The rhetoric of simplicity: faith and rhetoric in Peter Damian (original) (raw)

Il linguaggio usato da Pier Damiani (1007-1072) nelle sue lettere giovanili (primo volume dell'edizione Reindel, che copre gli anni 1040-1052) è stato spesso considerato barocco ed eccessivo; in realtà tale autore stava solo usando (e in modo eccellente) gli insegnamenti dell'ars rhetorica, elaborando una prosa nella quale parole e significato sono strettamente connessi, al servizio della verità Cristiana e dei primordi della Riforma Gregoriana. L'articolo mostra alcuni esempi dell'abilità letteraria di Pier Damiani, con particolare attenzione alla Rhetoricae declamationis invectio in episcopum monachos ad saeculum revocantem.

Given the emphasis on orthodoxy in early Christianity, it appears to go un-noticed that the real heresy of the patristic age was rooted in the linguistic practice of making apologies. Constraint on the use of argument, as understood from the Pauline corpus, framed crucial restrictions in forming Christian communities. The twentieth-century linguistic turn in philosophy prof-fers a warning to Christian philosophical societies about the need to ponder the practice of argumentation in their communities. I revisit key figures, i. e., Paul van Buren, J. L. Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who leave Christian philosophers with additional tools to dissolve the dilemma of a Christian's call to be a faithful witness and the Christian constraint on linguistic practices of argument.

Current histories of rhetoric neglect the early Christian period (ca. 30–430 CE) in several crucial ways–Augustine is overemphasized and made to serve as a summary of Christian thought rather than an endpoint, the texts of church fathers before 300 CE are neglected or lumped together, and the texts of the New Testament are left unexamined. An alternative outline of early Christian rhetoric is offered, explored through the angles of political self-invention, doctrinal ghostwriting, apologetics, and fractured sermonization. Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion that eventually made peace with classical rhetoric, but as a rhetorical force in its own right, and comprised of more factions early on than just the apostolic church.

The oft-rehearsed, seldom-contested story of Aquinas’s account of sacra doctrina has him holding that revealed theology counts as a demonstrative science, along Aristotelian lines, because it is subaltern to God’s self-knowledge. This paper seeks to question this assessment of the matter by comparing Aquinas’s view to that of another great Aristotelian commentator, Averroes, who holds the contrary position, insofar as he considered religious discourse to be dialectical, and not scientific, in nature. The paper argues that, although both of these thinkers strive to present faithfully Aristotelian solutions to the problem of the epistemological status of religious discourse and in both accounts religious discourse somehow ends up being less than something naturally scientific, ultimately their approaches have widely divergent starting points and foundations that lead to distinctively different approaches and conclusions.