Rhetorica:
A Complement to Dialectica
By Gabriel Blanchard
Rhetoric is the crown of the Trivium, and this is not an accident: "these three are one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal ..."
The Origin of Oratory
At the close of our recent series on logic (now indexed topically here, along with our previous series on fallacies), we referred to the famous opening of Aristotle‘s Rhetoric. Rhetoric, we heard, was a complement to logic, or something like that; logic offers us a beat, rhetoric a melody; where logic gave us bones, rhetoric must give the flesh, if these dry bones shall live.
Let’s take a look at it in more detail.
Oratory is a counterpart [ἀντίστροφος] to argument. Both are about things that are, in a way, known in common by everyone, not set aside under a specialist subject, for everyone in some way takes part in both; everyone to some extent tries their hand at critiquing arguments, maintaining them, defending themselves, and making allegations. Now, many of them do so haphazardly, or else with a familiarity born of habit; yet, since both these ways are possible, obviously one can also do these things methodically—for it is possible to discern the reason why some succeed thanks to habit and others by chance.
The word “allegations” hints at what oratory, or rhetoric, was chiefly wanted for in the ancient world. It would go on to earn its place among the properly liberal arts (that is, those fields of study whose chief purpose is the mere pleasure of studying them), but rhetoric first began as the most brutally practical of the seven: you needed to study rhetoric to be able to defend yourself in court. (This skill was what several of the Sophists, such as Gorgias, claimed to teach.) Legal counsel and representation, whether privately hired or appointed by the state, is very much a thing of the last few hundred years: in antiquity, if you were charged with a crime or civilly sued, you were going to be defending yourself. You needed to have the power to persuade.
“Convenient Heresy”
Which, of course, is what has gotten rhetoric rather bad press over the last several decades. “Making the worse appear the better cause,” as Socrates was accused of doing, is for many people the definition of rhetoric. The obvious defense—and it is true, as far as it goes—is that the ability to persuade is not bad, for the same reason that having things like strength or money are not bad. Everything depends on how you use them. The ability to do things is essential to … doing anything, which is what life very largely consists in.
Yet that can feel rather hollow as an answer, after spending a little time watching recorded speeches delivered by a historical demagogue. Or reading a piece of scholarship in a field you know well, and perceiving that it is downright irresponsible in its shoddiness, but at the same time gives such a veneer of intelligence and so maddeningly mixes fact with error, it will be years before people who already know the truth will be able to correct it.
A contemporary of one famous demagogue, who died, like him, in 1945, was the English author Charles Williams. He began a cycle of Arthurian poems, and lived to complete two volumes of it1; in the first, one poem describes Arthur setting up a mint in his kingdom, Logres. The coins have the king’s head on one side and his crest, a dragon, on the other. Arthur’s steward is proud of the achievement, but the court poet, Taliessin, is horrified:
Taliessin’s look darkened; his hand shook
while he touched the dragons; he said “We had a good thought.
Sir, if you made verse you would doubt symbols.
I am afraid of the little loosed dragons.
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words
escape from verse they hurry to rape souls …
We have taught our images to be free; are we glad?
are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?”2
The Word was with God ... All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. ... And the light shineth in darkness ...
The court poet here has gone a little too far: The Archbishop of Logres duly steps in to correct him. However, he does so by pointing out that all human tools and activities are in need of a kind of redemption, a re-direction toward mutuality and self-gift—or, to use a favorite word of Williams’:
Exchange
Part of the redemption of rhetoric lies, maybe, in an unexpected place. It remains as true as ever that neither the power nor the intention of persuading are inherently bad things. It is, unfortunately, also true that, in order to exercise rhetoric honestly, you can attempt to persuade only by means of the truth (as best you know it, at any rate); that is, you must not only try to convince people of a true conclusion or course of action, but to get there by means of accurate facts, validly built syllogisms, appropriate sentiments, and relevant authorities—and all without also dishonestly omitting the accuracies, validities, proprieties, and relevances that are not convenient to your case. One of the crucial pillars of rhetoric is, in fact, ethics. Or, to be more strictly correct, one of the crucial pillars of becoming a human being is ethics, and rhetoric is one of the skills where that tends to show, as much to oneself as to others.
But that is not the surprising thing. The surprise is that, if we take a little thought, we can realize that rhetoric is not only a tool of conveying meaning, but, ipso facto, a tool for receiving it, too. Rhetoric is not only the art of persuasion. Rhetoric is the art of understanding.
Much remains to be introduced here in a merely technical way, about dozens of things: the relationship of rhetoric to time; the three appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos; the rhetorical topics, or forms in which all arguments, including those of logic, must be constructed. Etiquette—or, to give it an older and more gracious name, courtesy—is very much a department of rhetoric, and not a trivial one. But it is vital, here at the beginning, to establish the fact that rhetoric is not merely a form of power, but a form of communion between one man and another: not merely a tool that has not been entirely ruined, but a holy thing.
And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tabernacle, the cloudy pillar descended, and stood at the door of the tabernacle … And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.
—Exodus 33:9, 11
1Given the literary “territory” Williams wanted to cover, it seems probable that if he had lived longer there would have been a third volume at least, perhaps more.
2“Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins,” ll. 65-70, 73-74, from Taliessin Through Logres; the other volume of Williams’ Arthurian verse is The Region of the Summer Stars. Both are far easier to follow with the aid of Arthurian Torso. This book (now sadly rare) consists in two halves: the first, Williams’ incomplete draft of The Figure of Arthur, which was to have been for Arthurian literature what The Figure of Beatrice was for Dante; the second, an extensive, highly illuminating analysis of both the first half and the poems themselves by Williams’ friend and colleague, C. S. Lewis.
Gabriel Blanchard has a degree in Classics, and works as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like our Texts in Context series, providing historical background on the great men and women of our Author Bank. Our two-part timeline of Classical Antiquity includes links to all our posts about the civilizations of the Bronze Age and the Græco-Roman world up to the transition into the Medieval period. Thank you for reading the CLT Journal.
Published on 6th February, 2025. Page image of the first leaf of Bodmer Papyrus 66, one of the most ancient nearly-complete copies of the Gospel According to St. John; readers may be able to make out the famous first line of the book—Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος [En archē ēn ho logos], “In the beginning was the Word”—in the upper left of the page.