“The words with which we seek to do him homage are his.  We look for new celebration and find echo.  Shakespeare has his mastering grip on the marrow of our speech.  The shapes of life which he created give voice to our inward needs.  We catch ourselves crooning desire like street-corner Romeos; we fall to jealousy in the cadence of Othello; we make Hamlets of our enigmas; old men rage and dodder like Lear.  Shakespeare is the common house of our feelings.  He has seen so exactly, so variously for us; he has struck the note of consciousness over so wide a range of human experience; he found for what he saw and felt such authority of statement–making his words not only a mirror of truth, but its vital, inexhaustible form–that we meet his voice around every corner of our sensibility.  Even our cry and our laughter are only partly ours; we find them where he left them, and they bear his stamp.”

“Now, the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood, who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood? For example, that those who are trying to persuade men of what is false are to know how to introduce their subject, so as to put the hearer into a friendly, or attentive, or teachable frame of mind, while the defenders of the truth shall be ignorant of that art? That the former are to tell their falsehoods briefly, clearly, and plausibly, while the latter shall tell the truth in such a way that it is tedious to listen to, hard to understand, and, in fine, not easy to believe it? That the former are to oppose the to melt, to enliven, and to rouse them, while the latter shall in defence of the truth be sluggish, and frigid, and somnolent? Who is such a fool as to think this wisdom? Since, then, the faculty of eloquence is available for both sides, and is of very great service in the enforcing either of wrong or right, why do not good men study to engage it on the side of truth, when bad men use it to obtain the triumph of wicked and worthless causes, and to further injustice and error?” (Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana)

Course Questions (for your consideration and discussion):

1. Ought we to tell all of the truth all of the time?

2. How does one distinguish between wisdom and folly?  Between rhetoric and sophistry?

3. Is wisdom sufficient, or must one also be eloquent?  Are they mutually exclusive?

4. Why do people so often choose folly over wisdom?  What can rhetoric do about it?

5. How does one lead the soul of another?

6. What is the difference between appeal and force?

7. How does one calibrate an argument for a given audience?

8. How can we help someone see themselves as others see them?  How can we help ourselves to do the same?

Feel free to comment on this and other posts regarding Rhetoric in the NT by clicking the “comments” button below.

“While the world lasts, will Aristotle’s doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth.  While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind.  He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born.  In many subject-matters, to think correctly is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or no, though we may not know it.”

Hello folks.  I’ve been quite a busy young chap lately.

Stuff I read this semester:

1. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind

2. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

3. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

4. Plato, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo

5. Aristotle, Rhetoric

6. Cicero, De Oratore, Philippics

7. Thucydides, selections from The Peloponnesian War

8. Demosthenes, Philippics

9. Plutarch, Lives of Demosthenes and Cicero

10. Thomas More, Utopia, Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, Dialogue Against Heresies, Richard 3rd, The Sadness of Christ, selected letters, poems, and trial documents.

11. Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, selected letters.

12. William Roper, Biography of Thomas More

13. Shakespeare, Henry 4th, part one; Measure for Measure; Richard 3rd; King Lear; The Tempest; various sonnets.

14. Donne, Holy Sonnets

15. Various secondary articles.

Stuff I did this semester:

1.  Wrote three essays: 1) “Rhetorical Aspects of the Brothers Karamazov”; 2) “Cosmos and Kosmos in Donne’s HSDeath“; and 3) ” ‘If Persuasion Fails’: Rhetoric in Utopia“.

2. Together with several colleagues at UD, organized a graduate salon to discuss the various disciplinary approaches to core texts in the IPS.

2. Attended university lectures with Christian Wiman (editor of Poetry).

3. Attended the Thomas More Studies conference at UD.  The theme was More’s trial.

4. Became utterly obsessed with the HBO series Band of Brothers.

5. Learned that an essay I wrote last year on Much Ado About Nothing was accepted for publication.

6. Tutored in the UD Writing Lab, where, among other things, I learned the difference between an en dash and an em dash.

7. Taught a developmental writing class at Northlake College.

8. Attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard 3rd by the UD Drama department.

9. Attended a performance of Brahms’ 4th symphony (I think it was his 4th) at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas.

10. Visited the Dallas Museum of Art, where Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1961) seized me.

11. Completed a formal analysis of Donne’s Holy Sonnets.

12. Assisted a professor by writing an index for an upcoming book on rhetoric and Shakespeare.

I’ll be attempting to write more frequently over the next several weeks.  Next semester, I will use this blog as a staging area for a Sunday School class entitled “Rhetoric in the New Testament.”  In addition, I may review several books required for a January-term course I’ll be taking on the Trivium.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution.

Check out my friend Matthew Mehan’s review of The Happening on Mercator.net

“Nouns and verbs let us call mere expressions.  For we cannot use mere nouns or verbs, when expressing or enunciating something, for the purpose of making a statement, and that is so whether we happen to express a spontaneous opinion or someone propounded a question to which we are giving an answer.”  Aristotle, On Interpretation

“A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”  - C.G. Lichtenberg

“Do you too believe, as do the many, that certain young men are corrupted by sophists, and that there are certain sophists who in a private capacity corrupt to an extent worth mentioning?  Isn’t it rather the very men who say this who are the biggest sophists, who educate most perfectly and who turn out young and old, men and women, just the way they want them to be?”

“But when do they do that?” he said.

“When,” I said, “many gathered together sit down in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps, or any other common meeting of a multitude, and, with a great deal of uproar, blame some of the things said or done, and praise others , both in excess, shouting and clapping; and, besides, the rocks and the very place surrounding them echo and redouble the uproar of blame and praise.  Now in such circumstances, as the saying goes, what do you suppose is the state of the young man’s heart?  Or what kind of private education will hold out for him and not be swept away by such blame and praise and go, borne by the flood, wherever it tends so that he’ll say the same things are noble and base as they do, practice what they practice, and be such as they are?”  (Republic 491e-492b)