4. Rhetoric And Tertullian
4
RHETORIC AND TERTULLIAN
The first assessment of Tertullian’s rhetorical ability was offered by the first writer ever to mention his name: his fellow North African Christian, the rhetorician Lactantius, who rose to prominence about a century after Tertullian under Diocletian and Constantine.
One cannot over-emphasize the importance of rhetoric to the educated and literate in Roman society and its influence on much surviving Roman literature. Today the word ‘rhetoric’ often has the adjective ‘mere’ attached to it, and for many the word is a pejorative term to describe flashy but empty speech. It has to be admitted that at some stage in classical antiquity this association had already been formed. Tertullian lived in an age that, in very broad and loose terms and in places influenced by Greek culture, has come to be called the Second Sophistic. Anderson tentatively characterizes this particularly Greek phenomenon as follows: ‘we are dealing with established public speakers who offered a predominantly rhetorical form of higher education, with a distinct emphasis on its more ostentatious forms’ (Anderson 1993:1). Sophists came to be understood as those who practised how to speak eloquently and with style, but who were so concerned with form that they neglected content. There is exaggeration in this, yet when we read things like Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Alciphron’s Letters, Lucian of Samosata’s The Fly and Marcus Cornelius Fronto’s Eulogy of Smoke and Dust, we have examples, not all of them strictly Sophistic, of how so much time and effort could be expended preparing and polishing speeches and texts about quite irrelevant matters. At its worst, by Tertullian’s day, rhetoric represented the victory of style over substance. Students of rhetoric did not practice oratory in order to prepare for careers in law courts or political assemblies as much as to delight an audience with their skill. Practice became an end in itself and declamation, the practice of speeches, became more and more fanciful and less and less practical.
Rhetoric had not started that way. It emerged in the Greek city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries BC as an increasingly organized and structured way of being a successful public speaker. Success was measured in terms of persuasion; in the law courts one needed to persuade a jury about questions of guilt or innocence and in the assemblies one needed to persuade citizens about which course of action ought to be taken. Despite Plato’s objections that, while philosophy and dialectic sought the truth, rhetoric and speech-making sought merely to flatter and win arguments, many, including Aristotle, composed handbooks setting out the rules for persuasive speaking.
The Romans adapted Greek rhetoric for their own oratory and from the writings of the anonymous author of To Herennius, Cicero, the elder Seneca, Tacitus, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, Fronto and the Rhetores Latini Minores, to name only the more obvious, we know a good deal about the Roman perspectives on the rhetorical arts and its changing relevance in Roman life.
Rhetoric was a complicated and intricate series of systems that varied from each other often only in nuance or in presentation and which took many years to master. Briefly, it was commonly held that there were three types of oratory: forensic (for use in law courts and which sought to persuade about past events), deliberative (for use in assemblies and senates and which sought to persuade about future events) and epideictic (which by then had lost its persuasive element and which sought to praise an individual while entertaining the audience, particularly when one was encouraged not to focus on the subject matter but on the person speaking). Persuasion could be achieved through the rationality of the argument, through the character of the speaker and through an appeal to emotion. In addition to persuading, orators saw their task as one of teaching and pleasing. It was believed that there were five functions of an orator: invention (the discovery of the arguments to be used), arrangement (the sequencing of arguments), style (the choice of words), memory (skills involved in moving from the creation of a speech to its presentation) and delivery (voice production and bodily gesture). A speech, especially a forensic one, could be divided into a number of sections: introduction (exordium, setting the mood), narration (narratio, telling the basic story), proposition (propositio or partitio, setting out the point in dispute and one’s own position), confirmation and refutation (confirmatio and refutatio, arguments in support of one’s position and arguments against one’s opponent’s position) and conclusion (peroratio). Style was a well-developed part of the art and much was written about the techniques of embellishment. It became the chief concern of the declaimers and was the principal cause of rhetoric’s ultimate demise. In a forensic speech or piece of writing, there was most typically a basis or issue around which the case was constructed. It was generally considered that there were four main bases: conjectural (arguments about whether or not something happened), definitional (arguments about how to define something that happened), qualitative (arguments about the characteristics of something) and competency (arguments about a court’s authority to hear a case).
One of the reasons why figures like Tacitus and the younger Pliny complained about the contemporary state of oratory and the art of rhetoric was because of the political situation. Being a persuasive public speaker was important when the affairs of state were directed by democratic or oligarchic assemblies. However, when one was a member of an assembly under increasing autocracy (as a traditionalist like Tacitus sought to persuade through the only medium left open to him, writing history), the need to persuade gave way to the need to flatter. Schools of rhetoric taught wealthy young men how to compose and deliver panegyric and encomium on set topics. Winning an argument became less important than appearing to be erudite, polished and sophisticated.
There is ample evidence that Tertullian had learnt oratory and was a skilled practitioner of the art. A number of scholars, most notably Sider and Fredouille, have recognized the importance of classical rhetoric in Tertullian. This is not to say that his works were originally speeches, even though this claim has been made about several of his works by some scholars. Yet what we have are what we would expect to find from someone who first committed what he wanted to say to paper. We know that Against the Jews was written because the speech on the same topic had not been able to be completed. In other words, his treatises were written as though they could be delivered as set speeches. These texts were not written merely as declamatory exercises, designed to impress the reader with Tertullian’s linguistic dexterity and flair. The topics upon which he wrote were lively and divisive ones in the Carthaginian Christian community and he turned to rhetoric in order to achieve its original objective, persuasion. He wanted to change opinion and convince others that he was right and they were wrong. Yet what was the purpose of actually committing his thoughts to writing? Did he intend them only for the small elite who, like himself, could read, or did he intend for them to be available to be read aloud for those who could not read for themselves? In a society that was so oral, the oratorical qualities of Tertullian’s writing ought not be overlooked.
What is the significance of this for reading Tertullian? For one thing, it provides us with a way of discerning the structure of what he wrote, as Sider states: ‘…he frequently develops his thought not, as we are often led to believe, in a random and haphazard fashion, but in a nicely arranged sequence of topics with which his rhetorical training had furnished him’ (Sider 1971:126). In other words, there is connectedness and development in each treatise. Although modern and post-modern literary criticism may decry the utility or even possibility of knowing an author’s intentions, it still remains, I believe, one way in which readers can be guided to come to their own appreciation of a text’s meaning. Being aware of the traditional arrangement of parts in a rhetorically influenced piece of writing also helps us appreciate the adeptness that Tertullian had in being able to adapt and rework that arrangement in creative ways as was needed, something he did frequently, particularly in his more mature output. In other words, we appreciate his originality as a writer.
More importantly, I think, an awareness of the rhetorical influences at work in his writings helps us to interpret what he wrote. Even though there is structure and order to his writing, the fact that rhetoric was so important to him means that we should probably not consider his writings to be treatises as such, even though this is a term I shall continue to use. This is the case if we understand a treatise as a systematic and thorough investigation of a particular topic. This Tertullian did not do, for he was not ultimately a systematic theologian. One should not turn to On Baptism, for example, hoping to find a complete treatment on this sacrament. There was obviously much about initiation practice and theory that was not controversial and could thereby be passed over almost in complete silence. Tertullian wrote this work because some ‘Canaanite heresy’ (On Baptism 1.2) had denied the efficacy of washing with water for the forgiveness of sins and he wished to respond (On Baptism 3.1).
I am convinced that most students who come to Patristic literature for the first time read it at face value. In their essays, they write things like ‘Tertullian believed that’ and then attach a brief (and hopefully referenced) extract from a tract, as though what Tertullian wrote was a string of facts. More familiarity with the author perhaps leads to the next stage, where one becomes aware that he could and did write contradictory things in different works, and one becomes locked in the struggle to figure out what he really believed. Such difficulties are only overcome when one realizes that he wrote from a rhetorical perspective. As I stated earlier in this introduction, in every instance Tertullian wrote in order to win arguments. He did not describe, he advocated. It was his overall position about which he was passionate; everything else was merely there to prove the point. Barnes states: Fallacious argument will always be a necessity for any orator. Even a valid case will have some weak points which need disguising.’ (Barnes 1985:217). So he could advance arguments that, in the context, helped his case but which were ones he personally would have found difficult to swallow. As the rhetoricians pointed out, for example, there were arguments that a forensic orator could put forward to defend the letter of the law, just as there were arguments that could be put forward to defend the spirit of the law and, no doubt, most forensic orators would have argued passionately and persuasively for one position at one time and then for the opposite in another case.
Having a rhetorical appreciation also helps evaluate Tertullian’s limitations. Those who know the rules of rhetoric know what to expect and, in reading Tertullian, when what one expects does not materialize, it could well be because he was not able to do that due to the weakness of his position. What Tertullian did not say is very important for understanding what he did say. Sometimes he makes it appear as though he has quite a number of reasons to support what he is arguing yet which, upon closer examination, turn out to be variations on the one argument. That he resorted to such tricks suggests that he knew himself that his case was on shaky ground. He did not write treatises as much as he wrote position papers or advocacy reports. For every text he wrote, there is another text (perhaps never written or not surviving), which is the argument a skilled opponent could have produced. Perhaps we need to read Tertullian less like literary critics and more like judges and juries.
The use of rhetoric will help readers of Patristic texts to appreciate both the rhetorical situation that occasioned a text and the intertextual relationship between author and reader, which, in other words, necessitates giving attention to historical, literary and social questions.