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Can
Rhetoric Be Made Ethical?
Prof.
Carol Poster
Mass
persuasion stirs up the emotions of large groups of people and manipulates
those people into acting or voting in accordance with the desires of
the speaker. As such, it is a morally neutral or doubtful tool. In so
far as rhetoric involves the audience being bent to a human rather than
divine will, it is not entirely commensurable with the principles articulated
in the New Testament, which insist that actions should be solely in
accordance with divine will. In this paper, I will look at how the epistolary form of the majority of the New Testament reflects an anti-rhetorical ethics of communication. I begin by examining how Plato in Phaedrus (1) objects to rhetoric as immoral and (2) suggests the ideal discourse should be suited to the soul of the individual hearer. I will next discuss how all extant books of ancient epistolary theory contrast letters with rhetoric. I will then show how the epistolary form used by the New Testament writers satisfies the Christian need for a discursive form opposed to the rhetoric as well as the morality of the sophists which addresses the individual soul rather than the people as a mass.
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