English 5361: Week 6 Post – Middle Ages and Christian Rhetoric
The middle ages brought about the dominance of Christian rhetoric. Indeed, according to Murphy, “the middle ages did not produce any major original works on secular speaking…” (Herrick, p 132). In fact, the Church served as the guardians of knowledge in the middle ages. The church has the single highest concentration of literate individuals, and it was up to these literate individuals to read and interpret documents and then relay them to the uneducated masses.
The educational system that developed in the Middle Ages was referred to as Scholastism, which according to Herrick "was a closed and authoritarian approach to education centered on disputation over a fixed body of premises derived largely from the teachings of Aristotle" (p 124). This technique involved lifting bits of the old classical works out of context to use in arguments. These single statements were called sententiae. The sententiae lost of the original context of the work, but they may also have helped to preserve the art of rhetoric.
The church was not know for high levels of tolerance of pagan created things. Just as it co-opted some pagan traditions and holidays, the church needed rhetoric to spreed its message, so it had to adapt the pagan documents with mentions of Greek and Roman deities to suit its needs. Sententiae may have helped in this purpose. With the statement lifted out of context, there is little risk that the undesirable parts of the manuscript would be read and incorporated into the educational system.
The educational system that developed in the Middle Ages was referred to as Scholastism, which according to Herrick "was a closed and authoritarian approach to education centered on disputation over a fixed body of premises derived largely from the teachings of Aristotle" (p 124). This technique involved lifting bits of the old classical works out of context to use in arguments. These single statements were called sententiae. The sententiae lost of the original context of the work, but they may also have helped to preserve the art of rhetoric.
The church was not know for high levels of tolerance of pagan created things. Just as it co-opted some pagan traditions and holidays, the church needed rhetoric to spreed its message, so it had to adapt the pagan documents with mentions of Greek and Roman deities to suit its needs. Sententiae may have helped in this purpose. With the statement lifted out of context, there is little risk that the undesirable parts of the manuscript would be read and incorporated into the educational system.
posted by Jessica Badger at
7:57 PM
4 Comments:
Jessica,
I liked your discussion of sententia. In looking at the same method, as applied today, and the Bible (instead of previous Greek/Roman rhetoric) as the starting piece---so using it as the origin of the pieces, we see that the same behavior is still alive and kicking today.
With Scripture, context is everything in most cases---however, there are certain verses, like Matthew 22:37-39 "Love thy neighbor as you love yourself," which need no context and are across-the-board phronesis.
But other verses are deeply rooted in context--like "children who disobey their parents shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:17).
The biggest divide in terms of context is the Old Testament (which emphasized law) vs. the New Testament (which emphasized grace). The latter is what believers argue we are under now-a-days. Others do not appreciate the switch in the Bible and maintain that even Old Testament things are still immutable guides for today. Guess, we will have to stop wearing clothes of mixed fibers and be weary of shellfish, heehehe.
In any event, the picking and choosing of Bible verses today, without understanding or communicating their context, is a practice that is alive and well today and mirrors that practice we have seen in the Euro-Christian times about Greek and Roman rhetoric.
Cris
This was a fascinating period in history not for what we know, but for what we don't know, about the ways in which the church suppressed information to the masses to try to, among other things, create a higher morality among humans and solidify the power of the church. This impressive run of mind control, which lasted for centuries, started crumbling in the Renaissance.
It's interesting how the medieval church is occasionally described as the "guardians" of knowledge, yet they were a closed institution that forbade anything that did not fit into the Christian narrative.
In regards "sententiae," I think it's rather sad that it occurs so frequently throughout history. The winners are the ones who write it, right? ... This is more or less a rant, but I think lifting statements out of context is one of the cheapest and dirtiest tricks of rhetoric. It's an unethical lie that should have no place in any respectable argument.
Sometimes I wonder, what is it about people that they are so quick to accept something that fits with their values and are equally swift in rejecting things that don't? During medieval times, the lower classes had no way of closing the gap between themselves and the educated. Yet today, sententiae retains a strong rhetorical influence. I'm sure the Internet and the globalization has enabled some people to reconsider things they've read or learned, but on a macroscopic scale, I personally think people almost refuse to consider the context of something before passing judgment. How does something like this persist from back then up until know?
I'm glad "context" has such an important role in academics and in our classrooms, but I wonder if anything can be done to ensure that society, as a whole, will learn not to be fooled by such "cookery."
-mark
Jessica,
Good point about the "benefit" of the sententiae being used out of context. I had thought about how that was "hurtful" to the student in the sense that they would not understand the true meaning of the statements, but I had not thought about how convenient this was to the church.
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