Preview this article: Shadow Living: Toward Spiritual Exercises for Teaching, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/80/6/collegeenglish29739-1.gif

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has attracted worldwide attention for his break with the public style of his immediate predecessors. This seeming rupture has often incited controversy, particularly between liberals and conservatives in American Catholicism. This division was exacerbated by the 2015 publication of Laudato Si’, Francis’s encyclical letter on the environment. Yet the apparent divergence of opinion masked a more fundamental agreement that popes should normally steer clear of scientific matters. The belief that science is one thing and religion another rests on what Bruno Latour has called “the Modern Constitution,” which draws sharp divisions between science and politics and relegates religion to the private sphere. Laudato Si’ rejects this framework in favor of a more holistic analysis articulated through epideictic rhetoric. I name this approach “nonmodern epideictic” and argue that it both confirms and supplements Latour’s understanding of religious rhetoric.

Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour’s theories help expose such pedagogy’s limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work toward allaying potential disaster.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded the first global rhetorical curriculum. Jesuit educators founded schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America—all ordered on their 1599 Ratio Studiorum. Yet this organizational and educational achievement faced several challenges. The Ratio reveals an attempt to reconcile the medieval education that shaped the early Jesuits and the classical humanism that excited later generations. The Jesuits articulated a reconciliation of humanistic and Christian virtue for the vita activa. These accomplishments mark Jesuit rhetoric as a distinct tradition worthy of deeper study by contemporary rhetoricians.

Postprocess theory questions the usefulness of pedagogical principles. This article proposes a casuistic pedagogy, which offers a stance rather than a method. Casuistry, the art of case-based reasoning, reframes pedagogy as a series of occasions rather than a system of thought, thus providing grounds for a postprocess pedagogy.

This essay offers Neil Postman’s thermostatic metaphor as a model for critical teaching. In this model, the role of the composition teacher is that of a thermostat that responds to a changing ideological environment by offering counterbalance. Such a stance is an anti-stance since it requires the teachers to enact philosophies and pedagogies, rather than holding them.

Abstract St. Patrick of Ireland's legend suggests that he was a great rhetor: After all, he drove the snakes out of Ireland. As is often the case, however, the actual story is far more interesting and compelling than the myth. Born to an aristocratic family in fourth-century Britain, Patrick should have studied rhetoric in the Roman system. But when he was fifteen, he was captured by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. As a result, he received a different sort of rhetorical education than his peers in Britain, an education that made him uniquely suited to evangelize Ireland. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers William Covino and George Kennedy for their suggestions for this manuscript. I also extend thanks to Richard Johnson-Sheehan and the members of the Rhetoric Reading Group for their close reading and valuable insight. 2Augustine and Patrick were not exact contemporaries. Augustine was born about thirty years before Patrick in 354. According to Hanson, Patrick was born somewhere between 388 and 408 (Origins and Career 179). St. Augustine died in 430; the earliest date of death that has been suggested for Patrick is about 460, and the latest is about 490. 3His name—cognate with patrician—hints at his station: His father, Calpornius, was both decurion, a city councilor and tax collector, and a church deacon; his grandfather, Potitus, was priest (before the rule of priestly celibacy was firmly established). It appears that though their lineage produced a saint, their service to the church may have been less than saintly. When Constantine became emperor, he exempted church officials from the taxation duties associated with the curiales. (If the curiales failed to raise the required taxes, he was required to pay them out his own pocket.) Thus, Patrick's father's position as deacon, or decurion, may have indicated an unwillingness to pay taxes more than a willingness to serve the Church. This loophole soon proved too costly to maintain, but it also proved difficult to close, especially as far away as Britain. The same was true for the rule of priestly celibacy, upon which the popes of the time were beginning to insist. Given the dates of the changing ordination and celibacy rules, Hanson suggests that we can date Patrick's birth no sooner than 388 and no later than 408 (Origins and Career 179). 4Patrick arrived in Ireland as the island's second bishop. Preceding him was Palladius, who was perhaps a Gaul. The fact that Ireland already had a bishop means that the Christian community in Ireland was large enough to require one. At this time, bishops were assigned at the request of the particular community. Traditionally, Palladius's bishopric was supposed to have ended in about 430, and Patrick's was supposed to have begun in 431. However, O'Rahilly argues that Palladius's tenure was shortened by hagiographers who could not deny Palladius's existence but wanted to make Patrick the “first” bishop nonetheless (15–16). O'Rahilly puts the end of Palladius's bishopric at about 461 and the years of Patrick's at about 461 until his death in 492 (8). It may also be possible that hagiographers blended Palladius—who, O'Rahilly argues, also went by the name Patricius—with the second Patricius, the Briton who became Ireland's patron saint (15). Nevertheless, no scholar doubts that the second Patricius was the author of the Confession and the Letter to Coroticus. 5Freeman's surmise may be supported by a detail offered in the Letter to Coroticus, in which Patrick describes Christians he had just baptized as “still in their white dress” (sec 3). 6In some ways it is hard to understand precisely why Patrick had such trouble writing Latin. The obvious answer is his slavery, but he would have had to make up his lost education in order to become a priest. Why, then, did that education not make him a better writer? His prose problems may have the result of disuse after so many years of speaking Irish. Latin also might have been Patrick's second language to begin with. While some historians suggest that Patrick would have spoken Latin as a first language (Thompson 40), others, like Freeman (10) and Charles Thomas (308), suggest that Patrick, as a Roman Britan, would most likely have spoken British as his first language and studied Latin in school. O'Rahilly offers a slightly different thesis, arguing that “his admittedly imperfect command of Latin suggests that he came, not from a fully Latinized district, but rather from one in which, while the official language was Latin, British was the common language of the mass of the population” (33). Mohrmann, on the other hand, suggests that Patrick would have grown up bilingual, but that “his six years of captivity . . . weakened his command of Latin very seriously” (45–46). Finally, it may be that Patrick dictated the Confession to a secretary. It's even possible that he dictated it in Irish and that the transcription and translation hampered the style. The high number of biblical quotations, however, suggest that the Letter was first composed, whether orally or chirographically, in Latin. As to his Irish, Patrick may have known a little before he ever set foot in Ireland. Patrick's family owned slaves, as did most wealthy families. Ironically enough, it is quite possible that some of their slaves were from Ireland; therefore, Patrick might have known a few words of Irish when he was kidnapped. Whatever his levels of fluency in either British or Latin, Patrick would have learned much more Irish during his slavery than he could have picked up from his family's slaves, thus gaining a skill that would later set him apart from his clerical peers. Unfortunately, like so many aspects of Patrick's life, the question of his language is clouded in mystery. 7Kennedy writes, “There is no ‘zero degree’ rhetoric in any utterance because there would be no utterance without a rhetorical impulse” (Comparative 5). 8Throughout the essay I rely on Hanson's translation in The Life and Writings of Saint Patrick (New York: The Seabury Press, 1983). I do not follow his practice of italicizing quotations that Patrick takes from scripture. Though Hanson also capitalizes the first word of these quotations, I have followed normal rules of English capitalization. 9For more on Irish mythology and its relation to rhetoric, see Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Paul Lynch, “Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: Ancient Irish Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 233–52. 10I have taken this quotation from the Catholic Study Bible (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). In his note to his translation of the Confession, Hanson writes, “I have refrained from consistently reproducing in my translation of Patrick's quotations from the Bible any contemporary English translation of it, because Patrick's biblical text corresponds to no text which has appeared in an English translation. He was in fact reproducing (sometimes from memory) for the most part a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament and a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew (and the Aramaic) of the Old Testament. His Bible therefore differed considerably in some details from ours” (Life and Writings 57). 11All Latin quotations come from A. B. E. Hood's St. Patrick: His Writings and His Life (London: Phillimore, 1978). 12There has been some dispute about whether the original text is corrupted in this place. The passage may read either as dominicati rhetorici or domini cati rhetorici, and scholars are unsure to whom Patrick was referring (Hanson, Origins 109–12). A. B. E. Hood translates the phrase as “clerical intellectuals” (43); Hanson, on the other hand, argues that it means “masters, cunning ones, rhetoricians” (Origins 109). 13Patrick manages to disguise admonitions to his audience in admonitions to himself in other sections, too. In Section 7 he writes, “I am not ignorant of the witness of my Lord who testifies in the psalm, thou shalt cause those who speak falsehood to perish. And in another place it says the mouth which tells lies kills the soul. And the same Lord says in the gospel the idle word which men shall have spoken they shall give an account for it in the day of judgment” (sec. 7). At first glance this passage seems straightforward enough: Patrick reminds his opponents that if they bear false witness against him, it is they who will be punished. However, the context dictates otherwise. In the previous two sections, Patrick has said, “For [God] said through the prophet, call upon me in the day of your trouble and I will deliver you and you will glorify me, and elsewhere it says now it is honorable to display and confess the works of God. However though I am unsatisfactory in many points, I want my brothers and relations to know what I am like, so they can perceive the desire of my soul” (sec. 5 and 6). If Patrick is reminding his audience of the stricture against false witness, he is doing it through the guise of reminding himself.