Seasoned Speech

Rhetoric in the Life of the Church

James E. Beitler III

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830871209
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

The Christian faith depends to a great degree on persuasion. In one of his letters to early Christians, the apostle Paul wrote, "Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone" (Col. 4: 6). Yet rhetoric—the art of persuasion—has been largely ignored by most Christians. In this book, James Beitler seeks to renew interest in and hunger for an effective Christian rhetoric by closely considering the work of five beloved Christian communicators: C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Desmond Tutu, and Marilynne Robinson. Moreover, he situates these reflections within the Christian liturgical seasons for the essential truths they convey. These writers collectively demonstrate that being a master of rhetoric is not antithetical to authentic Christian witness. Indeed, being a faithful disciple of Christ means practicing a rhetoric that beneficially and persuasively imparts the surprising truth of the gospel. It means having seasoned speech.

1

PREPARING THE WAY

C. S. Lewis and the Goodwill of Advent

A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

ISAIAH 40:3

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

CONTEMPORARY COLLECT FOR THE SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT,
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

I have not tried to prove that the religious sayings are true, only that they are significant: if you meet them with a certain good will, a certain readiness to find meaning. For if they should happen to contain information about real things, you will not get it on any other terms.

C. S. LEWIS, “THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION”

CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS WORSHIPED at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, a small parish church in Headington Quarry, Oxford.1 The stone building has a side entryway leading into the nave, which, though not as famously snug as the church where the poet George Herbert served as rector, is a charmingly intimate worship space. A single row of stone columns runs parallel to the center aisle, a design feature that Lewis took advantage of when worshiping there. He almost always sat toward the back of the nave, on the far side of one of the pillars. When I visited the church nearly eighteen years ago, I made a point of sitting as close as I could to the spot that Lewis once sat, hoping to experience worship from his chosen vantage point. I cannot recall a word from the sermon that day, but I do remember thinking that Lewis’s spot was a very comfortable one. After the service ended, I rose from my seat to find Lewis’s gravestone. Parishioners were still filing out of the church, and an older gentleman and I started to chat while we waited to exit the building. He mentioned that he had been going to Holy Trinity for a long time and that he had known Lewis.

“What was he like?” I asked, a bit too eagerly.

I could tell immediately from the man’s amused expression that this question was not new to him, and he had a ready answer designed to poke fun at tourists who made their reverence for Lewis known. Eyes twinkling, the man replied, “He used to sit around and smoke his pipe and look for someone to set right.”

There was, of course, some truth in the man’s wry remark: Lewis could often be found sitting and smoking with his friends at Oxford pubs such as The Eagle and Child or The Lamb and the Flag, and he himself admitted that he was in the business of correcting misunderstandings and false assumptions about Christianity.2 On occasion he was as argumentative and curmudgeonly as the man’s comment implies.3 But as those familiar with Lewis’s writings know, the persona Lewis developed in his prose is seldom haughty or holier-than-thou. He shares his vast knowledge with others but wears his learning lightly, calls people to righteousness but sidesteps self-righteousness, and meets his audiences on their terms but manages to avoid even a hint of disdain. C. S. Lewis has much to teach us about how to season our speech.

Scholars and critics have long recognized Lewis’s potent persuasiveness and acute audience awareness. Lewis is also routinely praised for his versatility as a writer: many have commented on the fact that he employs a wide variety of literary devices and genres to make his convictions convincing.4 What is more, Lewis himself seems to have thought deeply about persuasive language: in his speeches and essays, he often reflects openly on how best to appeal to particular audiences.5 However, in spite of widespread praise for Lewis’s persuasiveness as well as his own interest in the topic, only a relatively small group of scholars have turned to rhetoric to understand Lewis’s corpus, and many who have done so have argued that we need more scholarship exploring how Lewis’s writings work rhetorically.6

This gap in the critical conversation may be the result of Lewis’s own intellectual preferences. As Greg M. Anderson notes in a superb piece on Lewis’s rhetoric, Lewis received some training on the subject from his classics teacher, Harry Wakelyn Smith (or, as Lewis refers to him in Surprised by Joy, Smewgy).7 However, though Lewis held Smewgy up as one of his two best instructors, he clearly preferred the study of dialectic to that of rhetoric.8 According to James Como, Lewis’s personal library bears witness to this fact. Como points out that works by ancient rhetors are in short supply in Lewis’s collection, and he also highlights that one of Lewis’s logic books contains copious notes while his copy of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric contains none.9 Perhaps even more telling is Gary L. Tandy’s observation that none of Lewis’s many writings focus exclusively on rhetoric.10

Lewis’s own preference for dialectic over rhetoric should not, however, discourage us from an exploration of his rhetoric. As many who study his rhetoric have noted, Lewis self-identified as “an apologist and a rhetor” on one occasion and as “a born rhetorician” on another.11 And almost all of the scholars who write about Lewis from a rhetorical perspective have called attention to the apology of rhetoric that appears in his A Preface to Paradise Lost.12 Lewis writes, “I do not think (and no great civilization has ever thought) that the art of the rhetorician is necessarily vile. It is in itself noble, though of course, like most arts, it can be wickedly used.”13 Rhetoric has been dismissed repeatedly by writers throughout the subject’s history, so much so that today the term is almost always used pejoratively outside of academic contexts. But as this passage indicates, Lewis knew better, probably as a result of his familiarity with the trivium as well as his immense knowledge of the medieval period and the Renaissance.14

Moreover, in spite of the fact that Lewis did not mark his copy of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, a few recent studies have made fruitful connections between Lewis’s writings and the works of rhetoricians. Both Tandy and Anderson frame their studies of Lewis’s rhetoric using Aristotle’s explanation of rhetoric.15 Benjamin Fischer and Philip C. Derbesy make a compelling case that Lewis’s imitative approach is similar to Quintilian’s rhetorical counsel.16 And Jerry Root, who makes the claim that “the thing that generates Lewis’s holding power is his rhetoric,” draws on the work of twentieth-century rhetorician Richard M. Weaver to illuminate what Lewis is doing rhetorically in his writings.17 As the aforementioned scholars have demonstrated and as I attempt to show in what follows, considering Lewis’s works in relation to rhetorical theory can deepen our understanding of Lewis’s writings and the appeal of his witness.

The present chapter advances existing conversations about Lewis’s rhetoric through an investigation of appeals to ēthos in his nonfiction, with a special emphasis on the essays that appear in his collection God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics.18 This particular conceptual focus is warranted in part by existing Lewis scholarship. For example, after highlighting Lewis’s grasp of the rhetorical appeals of ēthos, pathos, and logos, Jerry Root adds, “Perhaps the mode most strongly evident in him is ethos.”19 Building on such insights, I contend that a primary way that Lewis establishes ēthos is by demonstrating what Aristotle referred to as eunoia, goodwill toward one’s audience.20 Lewis’s rhetoric of goodwill—which involves addressing audiences on their own terms, adopting a forthright yet humble stance, and cultivating communities of goodwill, helps him achieve one of his chief aims as a writer: “preparing the way” for the coming of the Lord into people’s lives.21 In this respect, Lewis’s manner of witnessing echoes one of the great themes of Advent worship, which invites Christians to prepare for the annual celebration of the birth of Christ and, at the same time, for his return at the end of time. We also hear Advent themes in Lewis’s emphasis on the doctrine of the incarnation, his explanation of the concept of joy, and his conversion experience (all of which are also related to his rhetoric of goodwill). C. S. Lewis’s life and rhetoric speak the language of the Advent season.

C. S. Lewis’s Ēthos

According to Aristotle’s On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ēthos is one of three rhetorical appeals by which a rhetor persuades an audience.22 Ēthos, the appeal from character, is Aristotle’s attempt to account for the fact that a rhetor’s ability to persuade is tied to who the rhetor is—or who the rhetor appears to be to an audience. The term may be used to describe both the “prior reputation” that the rhetor brings to a rhetorical situation (sometimes called extrinsic ēthos, because the appeal is based outside of the discourse at hand) as well as the character that a rhetor establishes for himself or herself as a result of the discourse (called intrinsic ēthos, because the appeal is constructed within the speech or writing).23 While much could be said about Lewis’s extrinsic ēthos, for the purposes of this chapter, I focus on Lewis’s rhetorical artistry and explore the way he establishes intrinsic ēthos in his writings.24

An observation by Michael Ward provides a good starting place for this discussion. Ward has claimed that Lewis “keeps his own Christian persona off-stage almost entirely” in his writings.25 This comment is not unlike observations made by Owen Barfield about Lewis’s work. According to Stephen Logan, “Owen Barfield remarked that reading a poem of Lewis’s produced an impression ‘not of an “I say this,” but of a “This is the sort of the thing a man might say.”’”26 Logan maintains that “Barfield was noticing an impulse in Lewis towards self-abnegation which, paradoxically, but in a way fully consistent with Christian teaching, became a distinctive feature of his literary personality.”27 Citing both Barfield and Logan, Benjamin Fischer and Philip C. Derbesy agree with this assessment, noting that Lewis’s “self-abnegation is present throughout his career.”28

I agree that Lewis does not often hold himself up as a model for other Christians to imitate and that he tends toward self-abnegation, especially when writing about faith. Ho...