Rhetorical Economy in Augustine’s Theology, by Brian Gronewoller

As far back as 1942, when Richard McKeon (1942, 5) argued that Saint Augustine of Hippo used terms from Ciceronian rhetoric to develop Christian doctrine, scholars have asked how the bishop retrofitted rhetorical ideas to do theological work. Over the past two decades, a rising number of historical theologians have set out to explain how Greco-Roman rhetoric—alongside classical philosophy, Christian theology, and exegesis of the Christian scriptures—must be considered, as Brian Gronewoller puts it, a "fourth fountainhead" of Augustine's thought (5). Gronewoller's painstaking contribution to this effort is to be commended for its attention to philological detail and its keen awareness of Augustine's interaction with the history of ideas. Rhetorical Economy reveals the depth to which the bishop internalized the training of his youth and used it to rediscover and defend Catholic Christianity.The thesis of Rhetorical Economy is that "Augustine used rhetorical economy as the logic explaining God's activity of arranging creation, history, and evil" (4). Gronewoller adopts Quintilian's definition of rhetorical economy, which he explains as follows. Rhetoric is the art of speaking persuasively through the accommodation of a speech to an audience. Each canon of rhetoric contributes to accommodation and thus persuasion in distinct ways. The principle of accommodation for the canon of arrangement is oeconomia. This term describes a fit order within and among the various parts of a speech. A speech is economical insofar as its parts are disposed so that their succession in time moves the audience. Rhetorical Economy is focused on analyzing the moments in Augustine's works when the bishop repairs to this concept in order to solve various theological conundrums.In part 1 of Rhetorical Economy, Gronewoller sets the stage for his main argument by showing that, from the early stages of his Christian life, Augustine conceived of the world as a speech uttered by an orator God. Drawing on a broad range of often-ignored texts, Gronewoller demonstrates that, for Augustine, all the events and objects in play from the primordial past to the present day are elements in an oratorical performance. God arranges them just as an orator arranges words and movements in a speech in order to make the most apt and balanced composition possible.The three chapters that compose part 2 of Rhetorical Economy show how Augustine incorporated the specific notion of rhetorical economy into his reasoning about creation, history, and theodicy. Gronewoller argues that, for Augustine, human beings can come to know the goodness of creation's staggering diversity when they understand the method by which God orders all things. For example, against the testimony of Genesis that God deems all animals good and very good, Manichaean philosophy argued that many animals were dangerous to human beings and many more were simply useless. In De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos, Augustine retorts that "in any ornate or composed speech, if we considered the individual syllables or even the individual letters. . . we would not find in them anything that pleases or should be praised. For, the entire speech—not with regard to the individual syllables or letters, but with regard to everything—is beautiful" (67). Some animals may seem fearsome or pointless in themselves, but, like letters or syllables, they participate in a broader economy—a rhetorical economy—that, as a whole, fairly rings with excellence. Gronewoller then turns to Sermon 29 to prove that this notion of economic order applies beyond the animal world to the whole world order, from the vast fabric of global human culture right down to the symmetrical superfluity of male nipples.Gronewoller then applies the same procedure to Augustine's thoughts on history. He takes the reader on an impressive tour of texts to show that Augustine uses the concept of rhetorical economy to explain how temporality itself can be good, how God arranges human beings in history, why the modes of worship differ between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and how God accommodates evil people in the arrangement of his world speech. The core of this chapter is a painstaking analysis of De musica's discussion of Latin meter that is a model of scholarly rigor. In that text, Augustine compares the orbits of earthly and heavenly bodies to a carminauniuersitatis, or "song of the universe" (107). By song, he means a rhythmic, metrical poem governed by rhetorical principles. He compares beings to syllables in this song, and this implies that they both participate in the music of the ages and, crucially, cannot conceive of or understand the economy of its composition in its fullness. Syllables and people come to be and pass away without seeing the whole. Their impermanence makes them seem unimportant in themselves. Fitted together, however, they reveal the wisdom of providence. Therefore, to be a thing in time is not shameful, as some in Augustine's time believed. At the end of this chapter, Gronewoller calls on scholars of Augustine's thoughts on beauty to make use of the concept of rhetorical economy.In the final chapter of part 2, Gronewoller explains how Augustine applied rhetorical economy to his ruminations on the problem of problems for a theologian, namely, the problem of evil. Augustine holds that God is the creator of all things but not the source of evil. Evil originates from the created wills of rational agents and has no being in and of itself but is, rather, a privation of being. This leads to a difficult question. If evil appears apart from God, how can God remain provident over it? Gronewoller shows from De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos and De libero arbitrio that Augustine found a solution in the idea of rhetorical economy. Augustine associates the creation and governance of the universe with the first and second parts of rhetoric, that is, invention and arrangement. All that God created or invented is good. What God arranges or governs is not all good. Thus, "although God did not create evil, God arranges evil," and he arranges it with perfect providence and economy by balancing sinful acts with commensurate punishments and reparations (143). Some have argued that Augustine's idea of the perfection of the whole is drawn from ancient philosophy, but Gronewoller persuasively refutes that argument and confirms the idea's rhetorical pedigree. However one might assess Augustine's formulations of God's providence as responses to the problem of evil, Gronewoller's analysis is convincing.Rhetorical Economy wraps up with an epilogue that chronologically reviews the texts analyzed in previous chapters. Gronewoller then concludes that rhetorical economy became so important to other areas of Augustine's thought because, early in his Christian life, it became incorporated into his vision of order. Past scholarly labors have attributed his vision of order to other antecedents, most notably Platonic and Stoic notions. But Gronewoller's analysis gives good reason to believe that Augustine is in a rhetorical frame of mind when he speaks about order. Having proved the influence of Greco-Roman rhetoric on Augustine's theology of creation, history, and evil, he concludes: "When performing research into ideas on which Augustine's theology draws, . . . we should create room on our bookshelves for Quintilian (and the authors of other rhetorical works) to sit alongside Plato, Origen, and the Christian scriptures" (160). Rhetoricians rejoice.One of the most impressive methodological features of Rhetorical Economy is Gronewoller's skill in showing why this or that phrase or concept in Augustine's corpus does not merely use the same verbiage as rhetorical authors but is, in fact, drawn from a rhetorical frame of mind. As it appears on the page, Augustine's consciousness is like a boiling pot of vegetables that roils with Neoplatonic potatoes, Christian carrots, shoots of Cicero, and sprigs of Virgil, and at any given moment it is hard to tell what combinations of these are bobbing at the surface. Gronewoller's exegetical prowess—his ability to detect the use of similar terms as well as thought patterns and metaphors found in earlier works—is a model for future scholars who want to claim that Augustine is influenced by or improvising on some previous thinker or thought. Each of his examples takes full account of the argumentative context in which his subject employs rhetorical terms, and this, too, turns dicey claims about influence and adaptation into reasonable conclusions. It also makes summarizing the richness of this book well-nigh impossible.While I think Rhetorical Economy is an important and generous contribution to Augustine studies, especially studies of Augustine's rhetoric, I will voice two concerns. Both have to do with omission. First, Gronewoller's mastery of the bishop's corpus is so extensive that I was puzzled by the curious omission of a work that seems relevant to his argument, a work, moreover, that would have contributed to his strategy of drawing widely from underappreciated texts. I refer to the De catechizandis rudibus. In that work, Augustine not only frames the missio Dei as a divine rhetorical appeal but also offers the key to the interpretation of world history, namely, love. The Son was sent to "reveal God's love among us and prove it with great force" (4.7). If God accommodates his world speech using the principle of rhetorical economy, it must also be said that, for Augustine's God, this accommodation is a form of care for creation. Perhaps those who come after Gronewoller can incorporate caritas into their accounts of oeconomia.My second gripe is that Gronewoller might have benefitted from drawing on the work of those historians of rhetoric who have shown how Augustine's rhetorical training clashed and combined with other strands of his thought. I think here especially of the work of Dave Tell (e.g., Tell 2010), though I could name several more. Perhaps, as historical theologians heed Gronewoller's call to add Quintilian to their bookshelves, they can collaborate with rhetoricians to create a more fulsome account of Augustine's fourth fountainhead.Gronewoller's book is an excellent piece of scholarship. It is so excellent that it makes the reader dream of new frontiers of inquiry. The lasting question on my mind, however, is the mirror opposite of Gronewoller's. Gronewoller claims—and demonstrates with striking clarity—that Greco-Roman rhetoric informed Augustine's understanding of creation, history, and evil. What I am left wondering is how his notions of creation, history, and evil informed his thoughts on rhetoric.