Eloquent Wisdom: Rhetoric, Cosmology and Delight in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo: 17 (Studia Traditionis Theologiae) - Softcover

Augustine Of Hippo; Clavier, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 250355265X ISBN 13: 9782503552651

Publisher: Brepols Publishers, 2014

Synopsis

Augustine of Hippo employed delight within his theology in ways unprecedented in Christian thought. It underpins his approach to creation, redemption, the Christian ministry and the inner conflict between desire and the will. Moreover, his understanding of delight would make an enormous impact on the shape of monastic theology in the Latin West. Yet no full-length study of Augustine's theology of delight has ever been undertaken. In this book, Mark Clavier provides an in-depth historical and theological study of the nature and role of delight in Augustine's theology. He contends that Augustine drew primarily from Cicero's rhetorical theory as mediated through later Neoplatonic commentators to develop a rhetorical theology that could explain how even those unenlightened by the liberal arts could discover God. Clavier argues that delight functions within Augustine's theology as eloquence does within Cicero's rhetorical theory, engaging people's hearts in order to make them receptive to a wisdom they would otherwise neglect or resist. Augustine conceived of God as an orator who persuades people to turn away from death towards salvation by pouring delight into their hearts through the reception of the Holy Spirit, presented as God's own delight. His close identification of delight with the Holy Spirit laid the ground for the affective turn in western medieval theology and its understanding of contemplative reading as a participative process of ascent to God. Clavier's work demonstrates that scholars need to consider the rhetorical basis for Augustine's thought at least as seriously as they have considered the philosophical.

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Review

"The great strength of this book lies in the patient and lucid intelligence with which Clavier retraces Ciceronian structures in Augustine’s thought. He persuasively argues that Cicero’s philosophical rhetoric is a science that leads from sensual to civil, and finally to intellectual pleasures; that Cicero’s rhetorical theory, in this way, prefigures Augustine’s “rhetorical theology”; that Augustine’s vision of a rhetoric-guided Church is patterned on Cicero’s ideal of a rhetoric-governed republic; and that pleasure – for the senator and the “senatorial bishop” – is essential to the origin and cultivation of virtue." -- Times Literary Supplement

"While theologians may be Clavier’s primary audience, his book offers rich and provocative insights into the development and influence of Augustine’s rhetorical thought that students of the history of rhetoric will find illuminating and useful." -- Rhetoric Society Quarterly

[From back cover]: "Mark Clavier enables us to appreciate how far-reaching was Augustine's debt to the philosophical theory and practical exercise of rhetorical eloquence, and demonstrates that he successfully carried it over into a new Christian culture in which it had profound theological resonance for both the learned and unlearned." -- Prof. Carol Harrison, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Oxford University

Edition details

• Publisher: Brepols Publishers
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 250355265X
• ISBN 13: 9782503552651
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316