What is Rhetoric? Part II

So, I’ve noticed in this blog, I’ve focused a lot on the history of rhetoric. Maybe it is because history is one of my favorite subjects, but I am going to continue in this vein.

In the wake of Christianity and Islam’s influence over the European continent, and the fall of the Roman empire, rhetoric began its strange journey into the broad definition that it holds today. During this period, the debate on the proper uses of rhetoric that was essentially started by Aristotle continued. Throughout the Medieval period, rhetoric would find itself becoming integral to religious as well as secular life in various disciplines. 

In the early part of the Medieval period, Rhetoric was kept alive mainly in monasteries, where monks learned to read and write and preserve records. As far back as the mid-200’s, Origen, who taught in Palestine, “used Jewish exegetical methods to legitimize a kind of allegorical reading that extracted moral and spiritual meanings from the Bible” (432). Thus, rhetoric was now being used to analyze the Bible. In 529 C.E., Justinian closed the schools of Athens, but Benedict founded the monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy “symbolizing the way Latin-speaking Christian culture would appropriate classical learning” (434). I found it interesting that “at this time the best scholars of classical learning in Europe were Irish monks” including the famous “Saint Patrick.” Given that, in earlier times, Celtics believed in skill in oratory to pass on their myths and traditions, it makes a lot of sense. Archbishop Isidore of Seville also helped shape monastic rules to preserve classical study. However, he saw rhetoric as chiefly “secular and especially legal occupation” (436). 

Throughout this period, the Byzantine, Muslim and Christian empire emerged. In 800, Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West by the Pope. He founded palace schools and brought in the best scholars from all over Europe to teach grammar and rhetoric to nobility. Alcuin directed the school and argued that rhetoric had “civic usefulness,” especially for the conduct of government (438).  

By the 12^th century, classical teachers of “grammar” would cover all five canons of classical rhetoric and included analysis of poetry’s “uses of tropes and figures” (439). Philosophy was transformed in the 12^th Century by the rediscovered influence of Aristotle thanks to the Arab and Jewish peoples. “Dialectic flourished for its usefulness not only to theology but also increasingly to professionalized disciplines of law and medicine” (441). In the 13^th Century, Thomas Aquinas famously used rhetoric in his writings that became Catholic doctrine.

Thus, rhetoric would come to be associated with the disciplines of theology, law, medicine, hermeneutics, poetry, and government. Aristotle certainly believed rhetoric played important roles in law, politics, and public life. In addition, the application of Rhetorical principles can be extremely broad. Knowing the history of how all of this came to be makes all the varying Rhetoric classes I have taken over the years seem much less random.