When Words Choose Us

I can really only dance around this. I haven’t heard anyone else talk about it. Though they should be the ones to make the most of it, Charismatic Christians generally don’t.

In one of the gospels, there appears to be evidence that Christ was at least aware of the Greek art of Rhetoric. In one of his discourses to his followers, he says that because of their faith and their testimony they can expect to be dragged before the law courts. What I’ve always found interesting is the advice he gives them about these court dates.

When it happens, he says, don’t prepare what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will speak for you.

This flies in the face of Aristotle’s heavy emphasis in rhetoric on invention, or finding persuasive arguments ahead of time. Rhetoric, Aristotle famously wrote, is “the art of being able to discover in each particular case the available means of persuasion.” In outlining his “art,” he presents three artistic appeals that will make a case persuasive to an audience: logos, pathos, and ethos—the appeals to reason, to emotion, and to a good character, respectively. In the ancient world, in Aristotle’s paradigm, this was the method for bringing a case before judge and jury.

And this, it seems, is what Christ was saying not to do. However, I don’t think he was saying to simply be lazy and blow things off. He seems to be suggesting something else.

I’ve always read Aristotle’s rhetoric as an attempt to find agreement with an audience through cultural norms and values—norms of a benevolent character and probable understanding of the world as it is. His Rhetoric emphasizes reason, though he admits that most of the time we can't have certainty, and then we must trust the speaker's character. And most of this discussion of reason, or logos, is where we find him talking about finding agreement through the enthymeme, which he refers to as the “soul of rhetoric.”

It seems that Jesus is up to something a bit different here. If we follow out what happens to his followers in the Book of Acts, they seem to get dragged before authorities frequently, and their defense is always very simple and plain, and honest. And it seems they often enough get out of trouble, sometimes on technicalities, once because of an earthquake, sometimes on the advice of the learned, and once, the early church claimed, because of an angel. It should be noted that in many of these instances, they were often beaten or whipped.

Only in the case of Stephen, the early martyr, do we get what George Kennedy has referred to as genuine proclamation, and this again is quite different from Aristotle’s rhetoric. In Aristotle, at the end, we the audience are called on to be the judge of the case. In Stephen’s speech, the audience is judged.

And they don’t like this.

Stones fly.  

If this is persuasive, at least in an Aristotelian sense, something is missing. 

Aristotle’s (Indirect) Answer to the Question of Shortened Attention Spans*

(*This blog is from page 42 of my textbook, Pretexts for Writing, 2nd edition, pictured here in the side panel and just released last month)

The argument has circulated for some time that too much TV viewing reduces viewers’ attention spans. By taking in programming interrupted every ten minutes for advertising, or so the argument goes, we have become habituated to resting our minds after little effort. We can’t pay attention for very long. This state of affairs has affected the way we are able to take in information. Perhaps most sadly, some suspect, TV viewing has resulted in impoverished political discourse. When viewers can’t handle complexity, politicians don’t have to explain themselves very clearly. They can get away with not having to talk about their policies and instead run negative political campaigns in which they portray their opponents as “socialists,” “right-wingers,” “cowboys,” “friends of terrorists,” or whatever current “devil terms” are enjoying cultural currency.

In the 4^th century, BCE, Aristotle noted something similar about attention spans. When attending to a speech—though TV was nowhere to be seen—most people were not trained in concentration. It was Aristotle’s view that people could only listen to so much in a speech and still follow it. For this reason, he noticed, the most effective public speakers tended to rely on shortened syllogisms, or chains of reasoning, which drew on what he referred to as commonplaces and opinions, sources of reason where groups of people found agreement and shared assumptions (42). These commonplaces might or might not have much reasonable support, but they were found by most members of a culture to be persuasive and intuitively correct.

One example of a commonplace found today, certainly, is this notion that watching television shortens one’s attention span. Again, this is a statement that may or may not be true, and it may or may not be supported by evidence. The important part of it is that it is recognizable as an intuitively correct possibility, which then encourages social assent. And, of course, it can be either confirmed or contested. That is, it can itself be debated.

Work Cited

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.