Amanda Condry

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LOGOS

Appeals to the audience’s reason; power of convincing truth (or apparent truth) by means of persuasive argument.

¡ Considering this particular unit and the reading’s we’ve done, it is important to note that we’ve seen not one but two major shifts in the view and use of rhetoric starting from the Renaissance up through the Modern Era. And thus, two different applications of this word can be generated!

d The Renaissance d

The fall of Rome ushered in the rise of Christianity. And up to this point, the Catholic Church seemed to function as an absolute power in Europe. In attempt to keep heresy at bay, church scholars found themselves turning to rhetoric in order to uphold their doctrine (s).

· For the most part, it seems the church scholars held a rather collective view of “logos”. Whether it be as extreme as the Gnostics who believed logos to be the very “wisdom” of God itself, the general consensus was the idea that reason was derived from the Bible—the Word being truth.

· Applying the craft of rhetoric, many church scholars emphasized the importance of delivering the gospel in an eloquent manner so as to win unbelievers to salvation, to persuade their audience to convert.

o Augustine, who accredits the great rhetorician Cicero with not only influencing his own grand-style of oration but even turning him to God, said of eloquence to be a “reflection of the divine message” (Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, ch. 6, p. 147).

*Because the gospel was the unalterable truth, church scholars who utilized rhetoric heavily emphasized the importance of ensuring that in being eloquent, one didn’t distort the original source, the word—truth.

o Leon, a rabbi from Venice and author of “The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow”, defined true eloquence. Though his book offered a commentary on Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, he linked rhetoric to famous speakers of the Old Testament. For Leon, prophets of old such as Moses, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, bore the ‘lips of righteous’”, for they were “not only persuasive but speakers of the truth, which they convey because of their rhetorical prowess” (Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, ch. 7, p. 186).

Contemporary Example: Often times Pastors, especially youth-pastors, take their sermons, which are usually biblically-based, and suit them to their audience’s demographics which allows them to effectively present the Word in an “appealing” way that reaches them.

--Famous TV Pastor Joel Osteen has an amiable persona and enjoyable humor that’s reflected in the way he speaks, the way he delivers his sermons, that meets and has met great reception with viewers for years.

The Beginnings of Enlightenment & the Modern Era

This period met a decline of spiritual focus and with it new needs for persuasion and theories of rhetoric arose. Humanists satisfied this by digging back and drawing influence from the Classic speakers. And advances in science “created new ways of thinking and new theories about how humans gained knowledge”—an epistemic philosophy clashing with rhetoric (Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, ch. 8, p. 207).

*In this period, there seems to be two houses of logic regarding knowledge and how it is that one comes to attain it:

1.) Philosophers like Descartes stood by mathematics and science that were able to offer concrete facts as the prime source of knowledge—downplaying or, in Descartes’ case, completely dismissing the importance of rhetoric in engineering reason. For Descartes, because the persuasive element of rhetoric involves one’s senses, the very reason rhetoric leads one to is susceptible to faultiness. For the intuitive mind is the generator of truth and mathematics the means by which it is checked (Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, ch. 8, p. 208-10).

2.) Philosophers like Vico and Bacon weren’t opposed to the idea of mathematics and science as knowledge, just to the conviction that it was the only source. Both Vico and Bacon believed that while mathematics and science indeed supplied knowledge, rhetoric supplied another. For Vico, the former gave way to abstract knowledge, but the latter went beyond, allowing conciseness for more complex possibilities (On the Study Methods of Our Time p.863) and even more, offering understanding of social conventions, establishing almost an ethic. Vico also believed that language reveals the processes of passion and imagination aside from reason alone (On the Study Methods of Our Time p.862). And so men who lack the sort of ethics rhetoric instills cannot expect to deliver with the eloquence rhetoric calls for, cannot expect to rouse the very passions and imagination of the audience which appeals to their reason in the first place (On the Study Methods of Our Time p.871). For as Bacon said, “the end of Rhetoric is to fill the imagination to second reason, not to oppress it” (The Advancement of Learning p.743).