One of the greatest Saints of the Church, St. Augustine, was also a renowed teacher of persuasion. In Book IV of De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine) he labels rhetoric as the “verbal expression of thought.”
Moral judgments are awkward and difficult in a culture losing its confidence in certainty and wisdom, in St. Augustine’s time and in ours. Good rhetoric has as its root the actual. Included would be ethics, values, and a sermonic language that persuades by drawing others into cautionary action made careful by the understanding that the human will must take into account the fixed nature of things. The fact that each audience is unique, in other words, does not mean that fundamental certainties about the human condition are adjusted even as rhetoricians adapt presentation to various audience situations.
For St. Augustine, good rhetoric is desirable because it gives civil society, set in a moment in time and inclined to speculate most about the present and the future, an awareness of its purpose in history. A civilization without the moral center – the source and summit of human existence, Christ – eventually devolves into a public sphere that has exploded into the many fragments of private yearning, poor in spirit and disconnected from all that came before.
One powerful idea through the Twentieth Century is the notion that truths are rootless circulating fictions, malleable and primed for manipulation. Situational, small truths swim in a sea of social construction. But rhetoric, like myth, is a means to convey what might otherwise remain inexpressible. Woven by power and status seeking humans, rhetoric is prone to error and misdirection. Good rhetoric, an incomplete expression of pre-existing beauty, love, and ethics, reflects a fragment of eternal and unknowable truth. Richard Weaver, in the Ethics of Rhetoric, wrote that “rhetoric moves the soul with a movement which cannot finally be justified logically. It can only be valued analogically with reference to some supreme image…It is impossible to talk about rhetoric as effective expression without having as a term giving intelligibility to the whole discourse, the Good.”
Catholic and Christian rhetoric is more than an instrumental discipline. It should also serve as an ethical means.
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