Crimen Obicere: Forensic Rhetoric and Augustine's anti-Donatist Correspondence (Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte - Band 120) - Hardcover

Rafal Toczko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3525567227 ISBN 13: 9783525567227

Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020

Synopsis

We all know that Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric before he became a highly influential Church leader. We know that he never stopped using rhetoric as a bishop. What we do not always know is what we mean by Augustines rhetoric. Is it the style, the figures of speech, encrypted in strange names like hendiadys or homoioteleuton? We also know that Augustine wrote letters throughout his ecclesiastical career, some of them highly polemical. The scholars tend to see the ancient correspondence as a part of a celebrated ritual of friendship. But has Augustine really used the letters written in the heat of the Donatist controversy within this cultural context? For decades the works of Augustine have been of interest mostly for Church historians and theologians, and rightly so. It is worth noticing, however, that the people who read or listened to them at the time of their composition were alumni of rhetorical and law schools, where they had to read Ciceros speeches and learn from rhetorical handbooks (some authored by himself, other written under his influence). The aim of this study is to prove that Augustines polemical correspondence is teeming with examples of rhetorical tricks commonly used in courtroom argumentation. I argue that the backbone of Augustines anti-Donatist letters, that is his patterns of argumentation and strategies of persuasion, is largely formed by the techniques of forensic rhetoric. My aim here is to offer an insight into how Augustine used rhetorical tools inherited from classical theory in building and developing polemical strategies in his anti-Donatist letters. This study should expand our knowledge on such various topics as history of rhetoric, ancient epistolography, polemical literature and Augustines art as a polemicist.

About this title

About the Author

Rafal Toczko is Assistant Professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland (Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika w Toruniu).

Edition details

• Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3525567227
• ISBN 13: 9783525567227
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216