Rhetorica religii

Rhetoric speaks to man in his whole being and out of his whole past and with reference to values which only a human being can intuit.... In the restored man dialectic and rhetoric will go along hand in hand as the regime of the human faculties intended that they should.

-Richard Weaver, "The Cultural Role of Rhetoric"

NEAR the beginning of the second book of his Metaphysics, Aristotle instructs us that "those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions." The two never asked of C. S. Lewis are, What is he? and, What preponderantly did he practice? The answers would seem obvious, for he is a one-man Argument from Design, so little is there in his life that is not of-a-piece, that does not have about it the feel of inevitability. His rhetorical temper provided a compulsiveness and a posture that could be resolved only in argument. Training, taste and talent equipped him for an academic and apologetic career, to the exclusion of nearly all others. Of course, he could not have remained an atheist, in his case rather an aberration than a settled state; so his conversion added direction to the high apologetic purpose towards which, in the thirties, he had explicitly turned his formidable will. In short, Lewis was the quintessential Homo rhetoricus, knew it, acquitted himself superbly at being just that, and yet remained deeply troubled by his own efficacy.

By rhetoric I shall mean that subset of questions and lines of inquiry deriving, first from Aristotle's definition in chapter two of Book One of his treatise, The faculty of observing in the particular case the available means of persuasion; and second from the Judeo-Christian tradition of apologetic, characterized (says the New Catholic Encyclopedia, closely echoing St. Augustine in Book IV of his De Doctrina Christiana) by God's "self-disclosure . . . in the contemporary world," concerning itself with "the relationship between faith and reason." Thus "the apologetic attempt is to persuade, to translate, in the literal sense, the Christian demand for faith." [Emphasis added.] The conception that emerged from Aristotle and others is that of a series of systematic adjustments among purpose, circumstances, and strategies. Those circumstances are marked by "exigencies"-some imperfection marked by urgency which demands resolution by persuasion and thus occasions discourse. There are constraints, of course, inherent to that occasion, the most restrictive being the limitations of what Aristotle called the "judge," any audience empowered to "mediate" the resolution. To these circumstances the communicator brings his resources. Some of these are ready-made, such as his pre-existing reputation, whereas others are discovered ("invented") to address the question at hand: some bit of refutation, a definition unique to the subject matter at hand, but especially proofs-appeals to reason, feeling, or to personal trustworthiness. Together these elements, organized around ideas both general and particular (topoi), and embodied in a certain style (for the last century or so our preference has been for an extension of natural, direct conversation), make up the tactics and strategy of a given persuasive effort. Finally, of over-riding importance is the nature of rhetoric as an inherent faculty of any human being: an ineluctable feature of everyone's interior landscape. In short, Aristotle could have begun his seminal On Rhetoric with the words, "all people by nature love to, and must, rhetorize."

IF Lewis had been around, he would have been Aristotle's (and Augustine's) model. Of the more than forty books he published, all but some poetry and the works of literary scholarship and criticism are either argumentative defenses of Christian doctrine, explanations of it for the purpose of persuading in its favor, or manifestly didactic fictions with Christian intent; six have a veiled intent with the Christian content submerged, but they fulfill precisely the same functions. This assessment applies even to Till We Have Faces, though as Lewis's one real novel (as opposed to parable, fairy tale or romance) it differs considerably from its predecessors. The same is largely true of the books published posthumously. In many modes, and at varying levels of intensity and directness, Lewis was relentlessly persuasive. He delivered only a handful of sermons, for example, but they made history. "Transposition" was delivered from the pulpit of Mansfield College, close to the house Lewis stayed in on his very first night in Oxford. "The Weight of Glory" and "Learning in War-Time" were preached to multitudes from the pulpit of The University Church of St. Mary the Virgin: Lattimer, Cranmer and Ridley had been tried there, and Wesley, Keble and Newman had preached from the same pulpit. These are impressive venues. But as impressive in their variety and modesty are the venues of some of his greatest essays. Here is a sampling: St. Jude's Gazette, World Dominion, Electrical and Musical Industries Christian Fellowship, Coventry Evening Telegraph, Bristol Diocesan Gazette, The Month, Breakthrough, and St. James's Magazine; of course there were also The Saturday Evening Post, The Guardian (small, but prominent in its day), Time & Tide, Twentieth Century, and Spectator. No venue was too large for his idiomatic voice, nor audience too small for his concentrated attention.