{"agent_id":"fenelon","agent_name":"François Fénelon","slug":"the-ancients-as-models","label":"The ancients as models: why should a Christian preacher learn his art from pagans?","topic":"The ancients as models","question":"Why should a Christian preacher learn his art from pagans?","position":"Because they were right about how men are persuaded, and being pagan does not make them wrong about that. But I do not put them highest. Scripture moves more than Demosthenes and does it with less; the Fathers preached to congregations and not to critics. Learn the art wherever it was best practised and then look at what the Prophets do with it.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Because they were right about how men are persuaded, and being pagan does not make them wrong about that.","n":[]},{"t":"But I do not put them highest.","n":[]},{"t":"Scripture moves more than Demosthenes and does it with less; the Fathers preached to congregations and not to critics.","n":[]},{"t":"Learn the art wherever it was best practised and then look at what the Prophets do with it.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*Dialogues on Eloquence*, on Demosthenes and Cicero as models and on Scripture and the Fathers as the higher ones; the recurring contrast between ancient plainness and modern ornament. Reception: Howell, Introduction §III, on the return to the classical conception of persuasion.","works":["*Dialogues on Eloquence*, on Demosthenes and Cicero as models and on Scripture and the Fathers as the higher ones","the recurring contrast between ancient plainness and modern ornament"],"reception":"Howell, Introduction §III, on the return to the classical conception of persuasion.","status":"Contested by those who hold the pagan orators irrelevant or unsafe for the pulpit, and from the other side by readers who find the preference for Scripture a pious thumb on the scale.","era":"1651-1715","discipline":"Rhetoric","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Dialogues on Eloquence","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"When you are on your guard and pray, will you have spurned the mystery of grace? Unques¬ tionably not. We owe all to God; but God subjects us to an outward order of human contrivances.","label":"Dialogues on Eloquence"},{"n":2,"work":"Dialogues on Eloquence","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A. Has this art no other aim than that of speaking well? When men speak, have they not some purpose? Do they speak only to speak? B. No, they speak in order to please and to persuade. A. If you please, sir, let us carefully distinguish these two things. They speak to persuade—that is what they al¬ ways do. They also speak to please—that is merely what they too often do.","label":"Dialogues on Eloquence"},{"n":3,"work":"Dialogues on Eloquence","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The quotation is from Ecclesiasticus, 37-23- 145 There you have Saint Augustine's conception of eloquence. But do you want to see how in practice he had the art of entering minds and how he sought to move the passions, according to the true end of rhetoric? Then read what he reports®^ himself of a speech he made to the people at Cae¬ sarea in Mauretania to get them to abolish a barbarous custom.","label":"Dialogues on Eloquence"},{"n":4,"work":"Dialogues on Eloquence","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"I do not speak of the things done by the prophets in figuring forth more vividly the realities which they wished to fore¬ tell, because those things were inspired by God; but, apart from divine inspirations, we see that those people under¬ stood quite differently from us how to express their grief. 101 their fear, and their other passions.","label":"Dialogues on Eloquence"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"telemachus","label":"Telemachus: does a book written for a boy amount to an attack on his grandfather's throne?"}]}