Abstract

236 RHETORICA Ceri Sullivan. The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 275pp. ISBN 019954784X On her Web page at the University of Bangor, where she is Reader in English, Ceri Sullivan says about her publications, 'Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee/ Jonson's confi­ dence in his ability to read through the rhetoric is a constant challenge to me in research, and my three monographs have browsed, sheeplike, over this terrain. The first [1995] dealt with whether one may persuade oneself in devotion, focusing on Catholic texts (Dismembered Rhetoric: En­ glish Recusant Writing 1580-1603). The second [2002] mused over how a merchant represents himself and reads others' representations in the real and dramatic markets (The Rhetoric ofCredit: Merchants in Early Mod­ ern Writing). A third asks whether, if the conscience is structured as a language, the consequence of the divine I AM is YOU AREN'T ... The answer to the question posed in the most recent book is this: not necessarily—or even, on the contrary. An effort to reconcile one­ self with God may lead to tears and stylistic excess. But as Sullivan shows, it also may lead to an increased awareness of the human, the other-than-divine, parts of the self. Because actions of the self in prob­ ing its inferiority employed the devices and strategies of language, rhetorical analyses of resulting documents—poetry especially—are deeply revealing about the nature of that self. In dealing with the role of the conscience in Seventeenth Century writing, Sullivan has included in her purview analysis as well as genesis, the actions of interpreting discourse as well as responding to it. In choosing as her chief examples members of what used to be called "the school of Donne," she has picked three for whom the actions of the self in attending to what the poets thought might very well be the voice of God are both problematic and significant. Of these three, Donne has the most complicated relation to the nature of the self, to his own ego—or at least it's fashionable to think so these days when we have several studies adverting to Donne's fear of death as mainly a fear of losing his individuality, his very selfhood among the faceless and innumerable dead. The conscience, so the Seventeenth Century believed, is an innate moral sense planted in our inferiority by God. Because that sense was usually thought of as a voice, the conscience was accordingly structured as a language, and rhetoric figures in it of necessity. Literally so, as Sullivan shows. Rhetoric is present in such devices and strategies as syllogism, snbjectio, enigma, antanaclasis, aposiopesis, 237 Reviews chiasmus, to cite only those named in her chapter heads. These devices and strategies show up in discourse when one confronts, negotiates with, or advises others about that invariably troublesome inner voice. Donne debated with that voice in his poems and as priest overtly addressed the conscience of his parishioners. "Peace pratler, do not lowre" begins Herbert's poem Conscience. Vaughan found his own conscience "darting" and "full of stabs and fears" (The Relapse). "Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan," writes Sullivan, "spend much time peering curiously at their consciences, wondering who it is who is confessing to guilt" (p. 17). But these confrontations with the conscience are not re-examined simply as literary features, certainly not as psychological or moral cu­ riosities. One leaves Sullivan's book having learned as much about rhetoric and intellectual history as about the poetry of this period— perhaps even more about the former than the latter. Protestantism with its emphases on virtually unaided approaches to God and on in­ dividual responsibility toward divine law set the tone for a period in which—for the first time, Sullivan insists—judicial rhetoric was em­ ployed to deal with the conscience, a rhetoric the poems often show breaking down. As indicated, each chapter centers on a particular de­ vice or strategy, in something of the following progression, to skim briefly over the chapters. Stuart manuals described the conscience in legalistic terms; casuists invariably formed their discussions as syllo­ gisms. Torturing the...