On Consumer Culture, Identity, the Church and the Rhetorics of Delight 9781501330926, 9781501330919, 9781501330940, 9781501330933

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On Consumer Culture, Identity, the Church and the Rhetorics of Delight

READING AUGUSTINE Series Editor: Miles Hollingworth

Reading Augustine offers personal and close readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. Its aim is to make clear Augustine’s importance to contemporary thought and  to present Augustine not only or primarily as a pre-eminent Christian thinker but as  a  philosophical, spiritual, literary, and intellectual icon of the West. Volumes in the series:

On Ethics, Politics and Psychology in the Twenty-First Century, John Rist On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self, Ian Clausen On Education, Formation, Citizenship and the Lost Purpose of Learning, Joseph Clair On Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law, Todd Breyfogle On Consumer Culture, Identity, The Church and the Rhetorics of Delight (forthcoming), Mark Clavier On Self-Harm, Narcissism, Atonement and the Vulnerable Christ (forthcoming), David Vincent Meconi On God, The Soul, Evil and the Rise of Christianity (forthcoming), John Peter Kenney On Music, Sound, Affect and Ineffability (forthcoming), Carol Harrison

On Consumer Culture, Identity, the Church and the Rhetorics of Delight Mark Clavier

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Mark Clavier, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Urbancow/iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3092-6 PB: 978-1-5013-3091-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3093-3 ePUB: 978-1-5013-3095-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  vi List of abbreviations  viii

1 Introduction 1 Part One  Worldly rhetoric 2 Augustine’s rhetoric of self-destruction 23 3 The rhetoric of consumerism 41 Part Two  Heavenly rhetoric 4 Augustine’s eloquent God 63 5 The divided wills of Christian consumers  83 Part Three  The mission and ministry   of God’s rhetoric 6 The church as a rhetorical community 105 7 God’s orators 124

References 145 Index 151

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing this book is how it allowed me to bring together the two main strands of my research of the past nine years. I’ve been engaging with ideas and issues associated with consumer culture ever since I was a young parish priest in western North Carolina, long before I began to give Augustine any serious academic attention. When in 2008 I began my doctoral work at Durham University on the nature and role of delight in the theology of Augustine of Hippo, I didn’t imagine that it would have anything much to do with my earlier study of consumerism, never mind provide me with new insights and conceptual veins to mine. This book has finally enabled me to draw those two strands together in a deliberate and concentrated fashion; for that I owe the series editor Miles Hollingworth an enormous debt of gratitude. The disadvantage of all this, however, is that acknowledgement now of all those who’ve helped me to develop my thinking would be repetitious since I’ve already thanked them in my earlier books. They know who they are and, I hope, that my gratitude to them is boundless. Sparing her blushes, however, I’ll again thank Carol Harrison, my former supervisor and now a good friend, who not only trained me to think hard about Augustine but also recommended that I submit a proposal for the Reading Augustine series. Those who know, work with, or have been taught by Carol will undoubtedly agree when I say that she’s a gem within academia: her combination of intellectual rigour, warmth, a capacity for deep care and support, and refreshing humility endears her to many. In more recent years, Peter Sedgwick has also been a pillar of support and a great encourager. He’s pushed me in directions I hadn’t previously considered, and our many theological discussions over the past five years have been a delight. Thanks also to Robin Gibbons, George Westhaver, and Matt Gunter whose respective

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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invitations to speak allowed me to begin addressing Augustine to the question of consumerism; in each case, the discussions that followed my presentations shaped my thinking and forced me to hone some of my arguments. Finally, much of this book was written in an eventful year of my life in which I experienced deep lows and tremendous highs. My most heartfelt thanks, therefore, goes to those who supported and loved me through those months and, therefore, enabled me to continue writing and eventually to complete this book. Both Carol and Peter number among them, but I would add not only my parents but also, most importantly, my son Paul and my wife Sarah. Paul, who’s about to finish school, has been my chief delight for more than eighteen years. Sarah, on the other hand, came into my life only two years ago, but in that time has shown me, through her astonishing capacity for love, how right Augustine was to say that delight sets our souls in their place. Mark Clavier The Almonry Brecon Cathedral

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Augustine 83Q

Eighty-Three Different Questions (De diuersis quaestionibus 83), tr. David L. Mosher, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press (1977).

CF

Confessions (Confessiones), tr. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1992).

CG

Commentary on Galatians (Expositio Epistulae ad Galatas), tr. Eric Plummer, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003).

CT

On Christian Teaching (De doctrina Christiana), tr. R. P. H. Green, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1997).

EP

Exposition on the Psalms (Enerrationes in Psalmos), tr. Maria Boulding, O.S.B., Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (2000–4).

FC

On Faith and the Creed (De fide et symbol), tr. J. H. S. Burleigh, Philadelphia, PA: Library of Christian Classics 6 (1953).

GRM

Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees (De Genesi aduersus Manicheos), tr. Edmund Hill, O.P., Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (2006).

HEJ

Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Tractatus in epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos), tr. Boniface Ramsey, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (2008).

HGJ

Homilies on the Gospel of John (In Johannis euangelium Tractatus), tr. John W. Rettig [3 vol.], Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (1993–5).



LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ix

L

Letters (Epistulae), tr. Roland Teske, S.J. [vol. II/1-3], Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (2001–4).

LSM

The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (De sermon Domini in monte), tr. David S. Kavanagh, Washington DC: The Newman Press (1951).

M

Morals of the Catholic Church (De Moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum), tr. Donald A. Gallagher and Idella J. Gallagher, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press (1966).

OM

On Music (De musica liber VI), tr. Martin Jacobsson, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell (2002).

OO

On Order (De ordine), tr. Silvano Borruso, South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press (2007).

S

Sermons (Sermones), tr. Edmund Hill, O.P., Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (1990–2).

SL

Spirit and the Letter (De spritu et littera), tr. Ronald J. Teske, S.J., Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (1999)

TCG

The City of God (De civitate Dei), tr. Henry Bettenson, London: Penguin Books (1972).

T

The Trinity (De Trinitite), tr. Edmund Hill, O.P., Hyde Park, NY: New City Press (1991).

TS

To Simplicianus (Ad Simplicianum), tr. J. H. S. Burleigh, Philadelphia, PA: Library of Christian Classics 6 (1953).

Cicero IO

The Ideal Orator (De oratore), tr. James M. May and Jakob Wisse, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001).

O

Orator (Orator), tr. G.L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library (1939).

OI

On Invention (De inventione), tr. H. M. Hubbell, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library (1949).

x

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Quintilian I

Institutes of Oratory (Institutio Oraoria), tr. H. E. Butler, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library (1979).

Marius Victorinus CCR

Commentary on Cicero’s Rhetoric (Explanationes in Ciceronis rhetoricam), Turnhout: Brepols (2006)

1 Introduction

Paradise just a purchase away We begin with the ‘good life’ as depicted in two recent advertisements: In the first, images of hard-working men – farmers, welders, ranchers, and construction workers – flit across the screen, interspersed with those of smiling wives, fathers with their sons and daughters, and the advertised truck barrelling along dirt roads. The only sound in the long commercial is a well-produced country/western song extolling ‘masculine’ virtues of strength, dependability, and endurance. Taken as a piece, the commercial presents the ‘all-American’ ideal of strong families founded on steadfast men situated within happy, rural communities and engaged in wholesome pastimes. Implicitly, the dependable truck symbolizes the identity of the equally dependable male customer and the kind of life he undoubtedly desires. The second commercial catches the viewer’s attention with the sudden syncopated rhythms of an upbeat song introducing us to three young, attractive women adorned with short, flattering dresses and happy smiles. With their shopping bags full, all three spring into a convertible in what appears to be a prosperous Mediterranean city on a warm, sunny day. As they pull away, colourful ribbons begin to rain down on them, which adds to their obvious delight. Their gestures and smiles speak of freedom and enjoyment and the whole scene presents a happy life – a kind of grown-up ‘feminine’ version of a world from a Disney cartoon. Only the fleeting closeups of their bright pink lips and the final still reveal that this is actually a commercial for lipstick.

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These advertisements do more than promote a commodity: they sell a dream. In neither the truck nor the lipstick commercial is the viewer given any information about the product itself beyond the self-evident facts that large trucks are particularly well-suited for hauling heavy objects and pink lipstick will make the wearer’s lips pinker. Instead, the focus is on an idealized life. Someone new to American advertising might think that each is promoting a dream rather than a product. Such a person would not, in fact, be wrong. In a gender-stereotyped way these two commercials use a portrayal of the ‘good life’ to grab customers’ attention, appeal to their emotions, and whet their appetites. Undoubtedly, each portrait was meticulously designed and scripted by a bevy of focus groups, researchers, market analysts, and consultants who used their expertise to craft the precise combination of words, music, and images to connect emotionally with the intended market. Each in its own way implicitly portrays what free and happy lives look like. They seem to ask: Wouldn’t you love to live like this? Wouldn’t this be fun and fulfilling? They also implicitly urge us to reflect on our own lives – cluttered with unfulfilled dreams, responsibilities, anxieties, and regrets – and to yearn for something like those in the commercials. The marketers have no need to create these dreams from scratch since countless advertising campaigns over the decades have done so already. Their job is simply to remind us of that dream and associate their products with it. We see ‘lifestyle’ marketing like these all the time. They’re so common that we no longer think it strange that our lives should be saturated by them. Advertisement such as these target, segment, or create ‘consumer markets based on behaviour, values, leisure time patterns and expenditure, individual preferences and tastes, attitudes and aspirations’ (Doyle 2016). If successful, the targeted audience will identify the advertised product as a necessary part of its self-expression and deepest yearnings. Think Nike for runners, branded Spandex for cyclists, or BMWs for successful professionals. The goal of such marketing is to ‘offer cultural materials (a set of values or idealized ways of life), grafted onto the physical product through expensive, long-term investment in branding, advertising and marketing campaigns, with which the consumer can construct and express their own identities’ (Eilis et al. 2011: 179). Pervasive lifestyle advertising emerged primarily during the 1940s and 1950s when public relations experts began to offer their skills

INTRODUCTION 3

to American corporations. One of the first major campaigns to link products to lifestyle was conducted for the American automotive industry. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, later explained how the automobile was marketed: In terms of the greater freedom of motion it offers to individuals and groups, at a cost within the reach of all income groups in the nation. Freedom of motion brings with it facilities for the freer exchange of ideas, a greater opportunity to see and experience how other groups in other localities live and meet their problems. This interchange of ideas and knowledge, brought about by more extensive, quicker, and cheaper transportation in any of its forms thus … becomes a conduit of democratic thought and ideas… . The automobile thus becomes more than a mechanism on wheels  – it becomes an instrument of democracy. (Bernays 1938: 126) Subsequently, advertisements started to display idyllic scenes of a carefree life into which cars were situated – everything from a young male driver being admired by beautiful young women to a happy family on a car holiday. By the 1960s, cars, trucks, and motorcycles had become an essential expression of the American lifestyle. That identification continues into the present as can be seen in the truck commercial that began this chapter. Since the 1950s, the number and reach of such advertising have expanded exponentially across the globe. With the use of an ever-growing variety of platforms – such as social media and smartphones – advertising has now become the ‘prevailing social language’ of America and, indeed, all consumer societies (Ewen 1988: xvi). Thanks to Disney, Lucas Films, Marvel Comics, and other similar corporations, such marketing saturates the social imagination of consumers from an increasingly early age. Very young children demonstrate brand preference and both children and teenagers increasingly now spend a considerable amount of their time within online commercial environments. Such is the depth and prevalence of advertising that we now rarely notice it. Even Christians who might strongly oppose the idea of businesses sponsoring their worship hardly think twice when an Apple™ or Microsoft™ logo appears on a big screen when loading a praise song or a PowerPoint™ presentation. A recent far Left protest

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paraded a crowd of young people dressed in branded clothing and carrying iPhones. Although each advertisement may tell its own story and offer its own promise of happiness, each is really rooted in the same ideal of happiness: a lifestyle based on consumer choice. This might not be immediately obvious since not much connects a dependable truck to lipstick. But both use images and music to connect with our imaginations and our emotions. They appeal to or even manufacture ideals of happiness and entice us to pursue those ideals by purchasing products. They also present their products as essential tools for expressing identities. They seem to say, Don’t just buy a truck. Get the boots, cowboy hat, and Levi jeans (not to mention attractive woman and kids) to complete the ensemble or It would be a shame to buy lipstick and not splash out a little more for the short skirt or a day of sunny shopping with girlfriends. Each advertisement is trying to impact us beneath the rational level, populating our imagination and shaping our desires so that we’re disposed towards making the decisions it wants us to make (to buy the truck or lipstick). Consumers, of course, have become increasingly alert to the tactics used by marketers. The failure rate for marketing new brands and products is high and the history of marketing is littered with colossal failures such as the Ford Edsel, New Coke, or Microsoft Vista. But my concern is less with the impact of particular adverts than with their collective social impact. A marketing campaign may fail to increase sales and yet present once more a vision of happiness for us to consume. Be they successful or not, advertisements are rooted in a conception of the happy life that’s constantly displayed as the goal for us to pursue. Likely, most people would find it difficult to describe that happy life (and it’s important to consumer economies that we never believe that we’ve found it) except that it’s only a purchase away and thus available in the here-and-now (as opposed to the hereafter) to everyone with enough cash. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, ‘The society of consumers is perhaps the only society in human history to promise happiness in earthly life, and happiness here and now, and in every successive “now”; in short, an instant and perpetual happiness’ (Bauman 2007: 44, emphasis in original). Take as an example a recent automobile commercial in which the camera focuses almost entirely on the sheer delight on the

INTRODUCTION 5

faces of various people as their loved ones slowly unveil a new car. No information about the car is given beyond visual appeal; the commercial’s emphasis is on the experience of receiving a spectacular gift at Christmas. The audience knows how wonderful it feels to give and to receive a surprise present. The images tap into our childhood memories of Christmas, making the scenes familiar even if the experience of unveiling an expensive car isn’t. That familiarity allows us to respond emotionally, to feel something like the visible emotions of the people in the commercial. That sensation is then replicated repeatedly in commercials, online advertisements, video shared on social media, and in shops during the Christmas season. We might not run out to buy a car, but we may begin to associate expense with Christmas. We have, in fact, experienced vicariously the good life and have started to yearn for something akin to it for ourselves. If we step back far enough to notice not so much what goods are being sold as how they’re being sold, we can begin to see how advertisements interweave to create a distinctive world of promises for our imaginations to consume. Our emotions, imagination, and desires can’t avoid expertly designed appeals for us to pursue an ideal of happiness that we’ve already been disposed to desire. Over and over again, we’re faced with these appeals, reminded how happy we might be, and are presented with a choice: to buy or not to buy. Like it or not, we now perpetually live in the marketplace.

Perceiving reality In his bestselling book, Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Buying Is Wrong, Martin Lindström recounts a study of ‘Pepsi Challenge’, the famous advertising experiment/campaign conducted during the 1970s in which people were invited to participate in a blind taste test of Coke and Pepsi (2009: 25–7). That experiment determined that when people were given blind samples of Pepsi and Coke, more than half of them preferred the taste of Pepsi. Yet, Pepsi sales lagged far behind those of Coca-Cola even when consumers were informed of the results of the test. A later neuroscientific study conducted at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston discovered why this might be the case. Its first test backed up the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ experiment: when slightly

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more than half of the participants drank Pepsi, their ventral putamen (the region of the brain stimulated by appealing tastes) lit up on the scans. But when the same people were told which product they were drinking, an overwhelming 75 per cent preferred Coke. This time, however, their brains did something very different than before: not only was there activity in the ventral putamen but now there was increased blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking. Effectively, the emotional part of the brain overruled the thinking part of the brain (Lindström 2009: 24–6). Lindström concludes: The positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola  – its history, logo, colour, design, and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke’s TV and print ads over the years, the sheer inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand – beat back their rational, natural preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally – think Apple, HarleyDavidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters – will win every single time. (Lindström 2009: 26–7) This study demonstrated two things about how we respond to welldone, pervasive marketing. First, if an emotional connection is made, our rational faculty is overridden by our feelings. This suggests, among other things, that the impact of pervasive marketing on our notions of freedom, happiness, and identity happens before we even stop to consider it. Second, the analysis added to the wealth of observations made since the advent of psychiatry that people aren’t nearly the rational agents that they like to believe. A bedrock belief of the Enlightenment was that human beings have the capacity for objective, rational thought. The long project of modernization assumed that properly educated men could exert their reason and will over nature and ‘weaker’ people (that is, ethnic minorities, less advantaged societies, women, and Catholics) to construct a better society. Even when much of the rhetoric of modernity had been rejected after the horrors of the twentieth century, belief in the rational agency of individuals remained strong at the popular level (as it continues to be in a kind of mythological way to this day).

INTRODUCTION 7

Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, however, a growing number of social scientists became increasingly convinced that our conscious behaviour and beliefs often aren’t the result of a rational process but of a subconscious world of dimly perceived psychological influences. In 1896, Gustave Le Bon, one of the earliest analysts of ‘social psychology’, wrote in his The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences… . The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. (Le Bon 2000: 18) What Le Bon and other social psychologists perceived is that what’s true for the individual must also be true for ‘the crowd’. Sigmund Freud observed: The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at first may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely… . In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first, individual psychology … is at the same time social psychology as well. (quoted in Ewen 1988: 138–9) Before we even start the process of rational consideration we’re undermined by the limits placed on us by our experience of inhabiting our world. Freud’s view of the crowd was of a neurotic writ large ‘guided not by ordinary objective reality but psychological reality’ (Ewen 1988: 139). In short, how we perceive reality is usually influenced more by the groups to which we belong than by the objective evidence we encounter. So, for example, a wealth of evidence about global climate change has failed to undermine the beliefs of a large swathe of American conservatism. This socially constructed reality is even truer for things like marriage, money,

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freedom, and nationhood that we take for facts but actually arise entirely from social agreements (Searle 1996: 1–7). We’ll return to consider this idea of belonging in more detail in the second part of this book. For now, let’s continue to follow this strand of thought back to the Pepsi test. Le Bon contended that crowds are influenced by often disconnected images that our imaginations weave together to form a narrative: Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact. (Le Bon 2000: 23–4) Public opinion isn’t governed by rational principals but by meaning-laden images woven together by our social imagination. He referred to this as the ‘excessive suggestibility’ of crowds (Le Bon 2000: 23). For an example of this, consider the impact the continuous replaying of images of planes hitting the Twin Towers had on American public opinion. Thirty years after Le Bon’s book, the American journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann explored the gulf between reality and the social perception of reality in his influential book Public Opinion. To Le Bon’s insights he added the idea that the ‘pictures inside people’s heads’ were shaped just as much by mass media as by encounters with reality. These mass-mediated words and images impress themselves on our imagination to create a ‘pseudo-environment’ that we mistake for reality. Lippmann called this fabricated reality the ‘medium of fictions’. By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself…  .  A work of fiction may have almost any degree of fidelity, and so long as the degree of fidelity can be taken into account, fiction is not misleading. In fact, human culture is very largely the selection, the rearrangement, the tracing of patterns upon, and the stylizing of, what William James called ‘the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas’. The alternative to the use of fictions is direct exposure to the ebb and

INTRODUCTION 9

flow of sensation. That is not a real alternative… . For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world. (Lippmann 1998: 16) Lippmann’s genius was to recognize how far perception of reality had come to depend on presentations of that reality through mass media. He further recognized that if one could influence or control the flow of images that form the ‘pseudo-environment’ that social groups mistake for reality then one could potentially control how that group perceives reality. He entitled such social engineering, the ‘manufacturing of consent’ and argued that social psychologists should collaborate with the government to ensure the healthy management of modern society, which he believed was inclined towards revolution and chaos (Ewen 1988: 146–50). The political events in 2016 provide a helpful way of illustrating Lippmann’s observations. The surprising result of the Brexit referendum and of the American presidential election caused many people suddenly to become aware of the social ‘echo chambers’ from which they had been engaging with the world. By surrounding themselves on social media and in their other social engagements with like-minded people, they encountered a society very different from the one reflected in the vote to leave the EU or to elect Trump. One study of Facebook communities found that users tended to seek out information that strengthened their preferred narratives and to reject information that undermined it. Alarmingly, when deliberately false information was introduced into these echo chambers, it was absorbed and viewed as credible as long as it conformed with the primary narrative. And even when more truthful information was introduced to correct or ‘debunk’ falsehoods, either it was ignored, or it reinforced the users’ false beliefs. (Emba 2016) These findings were confirmed by the political developments of 2016: those confident that the UK would remain in the EU or that Hilary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump were surprised to

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find that reality differed quite substantially from what they had experienced through social media and various news outlets. The advent of the Internet and especially of social media has produced a treasure trove of information (facts, opinions, and falsehoods) for social groups to use to create the ‘pseudo-environments’ that Lippmann observed. Let’s return now to the neuroscientific study of the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ armed with the insights of Freud, Le Bon, and Lippmann. Recall that when people knew what they were drinking, not only did they overwhelming choose Coke, but their brains also adjusted accordingly even among those who knew they preferred the taste of Pepsi. The brain scans demonstrated the power that marketed ‘pseudo-environments’ have over our perception of reality: the objective reality of their natural preference for Pepsi yielded to the psychological conditioning of Coca-Cola’s advertising. Coke had managed to connect with, perhaps even shape, their social reality and loyalties; not only had they been disposed to prefer the taste of Coke but even their brains had been convinced of this preference. Crucially, no one perceived this adjustment of taste as a violation or manipulation. The ability of brands such as Coca-Cola to connect emotionally with and even reshape our perception points towards a larger question: if individual marketing campaigns can influence our perceptions of reality how much more so can the sum of all marketing? If the marketing of Coca-Cola could persuade people that Coke tastes better than Pepsi then what impact might the collective and ever-present image of a happy life based on consumption have on how we perceive happiness? Le Bon and Lippmann’s studies suggest that the impact is potentially profound. Moreover, the neuroscientific study of the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ demonstrates that the constant image of marketed happiness impacts us at the level of our imagination, either bypassing or short-circuiting our judgement even when we know reality is different. Ultimately, even first-hand objective knowledge is impotent because our actions arise from an emotional engagement with the world – minds go where hearts lead.

The rhetoric of consumerism The basis for the emotional appeal of marketing and advertising is found in the dynamic of persuasion. All forms of advertising seek

INTRODUCTION  11

to persuade us to make a choice, to undertake some action. The commercials at the start of this chapter are seeking to persuade us to buy a truck or lipstick. The collective advertising of Coca-Cola is aimed at persuading the general public that it prefers to drink their soft drinks over Pepsi. They appeal to our emotions and desires so that we’ll take notice and respond positively to their message. Marketers deliberately research ways to bypass our capacity to engage in critical reflection so that we’ll respond impulsively and emotionally to their sales pitch (see Roberts 2015 for an engaging discussion of this). The act of persuasion is otherwise known as rhetoric. Rhetoric is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The art of using language effectively so as to persuade or influence others’ (OED Online 2016). The language employed may now include a range of multimedia techniques (sight, sound, etc.) and insights from psychological and neuroscientific studies, but the goal remains the same: to persuade us to do something. We must constantly navigate attempts to persuade us to choose; indeed, the freedom of choice has become one of our highest ideals, defining our conception of freedom and underpinning our social ethics (e.g. abortion, gun ownership, and euthanasia) and our consumer identities (e.g. the lifestyles and brands we choose to express them). Again, these attempts at persuasion are rarely rational. Hardly ever are we asked to undertake a careful examination, employing logic to ensure that we reach the best decision. Often occasions when we’re treated as rational agents and applauded for our acumen turn out simply to be another way of appealing to us emotionally. After all, we like to be thought intelligent, savvy, and discriminating. Flattery remains as potent as ever. Consumer society is therefore rhetorical: its basic component is not the Enlightenment’s ‘autonomous individual, endowed with an essential capacity for reason and agency’ (Vivien 2002: 236) but consumers gathered into tribes of shared consumption, shared sentiment, and shared notions of the good life. Quoting the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, Bradford Vivian describes the rhetoric of consumerism as an aesthetic (rather than conceptual) rhetoric; an affective (not rational) communication; a collective (instead of individual) expression…  .  The rhetoric of collective style involves ‘a

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communication’ whose ‘sole objective [is] to “touch” the other, to simply be in contact, to participate together in a form of gregariousness. This is the communication of sport, of music, of consumption, or else that banal communication of the daily or weekly stroll through the urban spaces designed for this effect. This “tactile” communication is also a form of address: we speak to each other by touching’. By this logic, we “touch” one another rhetorically – that is, we communicate affectively in the service of some pragmatic collective purpose – through sentiment, aesthetic, or performance instead of reason, ideals, or consensus. (Vivien 2002: 236) In other words, we now live in a world of displays, which signal the group with which we identify and seek to persuade others to join – or, if not join, at least think well of us. Be cool, be savvy, be fashionable like us. Consumerism is rhetorical on three levels: the universal, the tribal, and the individual. First, consumerism as a whole depends upon the practice of persuasion within the global theatre of the market; modern economies prosper only insofar as consumers can be persuaded to consume on a massive scale. Second, the freedom of the market produces an environment of rival rhetorics, each offering competing ways of living within a consumer culture; these rival narratives are, in fact, tribes of rhetoric that base their identity on shared perceptions and sentiments produced by the market. Finally, individual consumers inhabit these consumer tribes within a consumer culture from which there’s no escape – the universal and tribal levels of rhetoric produce Lippmann’s ‘fictions’ of reality from which consumers derive their identities and their notions of freedom and happiness. Let’s take two hypothetical individuals, Jack and Diane, as illustrations of how consumer rhetorics shape lives. Both Jack and Diane are born and raised within a consumer culture, which means from an early age they’re exposed to various forms of persuasion. Some of these they share – perhaps they both enjoy pretending to be characters from Harry Potter or Star Wars – others are tailored to their gender, social class, and ethnicity. From a time before they can even recall, each has become what Zygmunt Bauman calls a ‘consumer-as-vocation’ or people who ‘treat consumption as a vocation’ and who live within a society where

INTRODUCTION  13

‘consumption-seen-and-treated-as-vocation is one universal right and universal duty that knows of no exception’ (Bauman 2007: 55). That vocation orients them towards pursuing a this-worldly happiness found through the purchase of goods and services. And the means for pursuing those ends are themselves rhetorical: only by becoming attractive commodities ‘by obtaining the qualities for which there is already a market demand, or recycling the qualities already possessed into commodities for which demand can go on to be created’ (Bauman 2007: 56). During their teenage years, Jack and Diane learn to become proficient consumers by dipping in and out of a series of rhetorical communities. Jack becomes a gamer, hanging out with and dressing like the other gamers in his school. Diane puts away her Disney fairies at about the same time that she discovers that she must present herself as pretty, slender, friendly, and happy with life. Both travel with their respective tribes on a journey of fashions marked like a church calendar by major feast days: the release of new products, shopping with friends, music concerts, and the like. Both Jack and Diane also spend a great deal of their life within the ‘digital ecosystem’ constructed and maintained by various corporations, and learn to navigate that virtual world better than they can navigate their own neighbourhood. Almost every aspect of their teenage life consists of practices, dress codes, perspectives, and beliefs that they’ve been persuaded by marketers to adopt – and this has become their reality. Without realizing it, they have been subject to expertly devised rhetoric from the cradle; in fact, they probably don’t even appreciate that they are participating in a key ingredient of consumer economies: teenage consumption.1 From then on, Diane and Jack spend their lives encountering the realities of daily life within a world awash with rhetoric. Much of their daily interactions will occur through social media and regularly involve discussions about new products and services. Did you hear about the new iPhone? Wasn’t that a great episode last night! I’m a Dolphins fan … who do you like? Diane moves gradually to the left, and so more and more of her news

In 2010, teenage girls alone added $216.3 billion of purchasing power to the American economy. See Euro RSPG Worldwide. The Teenage Girl as Consumer and Communicator, 2010. 1

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consumption and Facebook activity generate adverts that will appeal to her interests and reinforce a market-derived stereotype of who she is as a consumer. The same happens to Jack as he moves further to the right. Soon each is living within largely distinct rhetorical communities, offering their distinct paths towards the good life based on consumption. By almost any measure, both appear pleased with life: they delight in their pastimes, feel a sense of freedom through their choices, and are fulfilled by their different forms of self-expression. Even though they’ve spent much of their life within a world of persuasion, they don’t feel manipulated but perceive their delights, prejudices, and perspectives as authentically their own. This consumer paradise has been made possible through the ingenious rhetoric of marketers without whom Jack and Diane’s version of reality would crumble.

The Christian consumer The rhetorical nature of consumerism shares many of the qualities typically associated with religion. Bauman suggests this with his language about our being ‘consumers-by-vocation’. Steven Miles begins his sociological study of consumerism by noting that ‘the parallel with religion is not an accidental one. Consumerism is ubiquitous and ephemeral. It is arguably the religion of the late twentieth century’ (Miles 1998: 1). Even marketers recognize the religious quality of their own trade and seek to attract religious fervour to their brands (Lindström 2009: 107–27). And the theologian William Cavanaugh argues that consumerism ‘is an important subject for theology because it is a spiritual disposition, a way of looking at the world around us that is deeply formative’ (2008: 35). The rhetorical and religious nature of consumerism confronts the Church with a dilemma. Either it accepts consumer culture and simply tries successfully to express its own rhetoric within it or it must find a way to challenge consumerism’s hold over individuals and society. The first approach involves the Church effectively becoming a consumer tribe and employing the same means and methods that other consumer tribes use to attract clientele. This approach has the advantage of being achievable and even profitable (there are countless books, websites, and seminars on marketing

INTRODUCTION  15

Christianity), capable of producing a coherent subculture with its own array of commodities. But it has the distinct disadvantage of having to conform to the rules set by consumerism. Christianity therefore becomes a lifestyle, an accessory for self-expression, and little more than a way for individuals to become religiousconsumers-by-vocation. This form of Christianity also lacks the secure ground on which to stand against the acknowledged negative consequences of consumerism such as global warming and unsustainable consumption of the world’s resources. The second approach has the advantage of challenging consumerism root and branch. It seeks to stand apart from consumer culture, perhaps even to understand its own mission as converting people away from consumer identities. In theory, such an approach would offer an alternative way of engaging with the world that manifests itself in habits and practices that orient people towards God. It would also more ably challenge the harmful impact of consumerism on the environment, the poor, and the developing world. An example of such an approach is the Papal encyclical Laudato si. The second part of that encyclical offers a peculiarly Catholic response to the world’s ecological crisis. First, it identifies the nature of consumerism and its impact on individuals: Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism is one example of how the techno-economic paradigm affects individuals… . This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. Amid this confusion, postmodern humanity has not yet achieved a new selfawareness capable of offering guidance and direction, and this lack of identity is a source of anxiety. (Pope Francis 2017: sec. 203) Then, under the heading ‘Joy and Peace’, it presents Christianity as a different, even opposing, manner of engaging with the world: ‘Christian spirituality proposes an alternative understanding of the quality of life, and encourages a prophetic and contemplative

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lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption’ (2017: sec. 222). Despite the encyclical’s unfortunate use of the term ‘lifestyle’, its understanding of Christianity seeks to stand apart from consumerism and to offer a means of escape or conversion from it. This second approach, however, faces two problems that would appear insurmountable. First, the very pervasiveness of consumer culture makes it difficult to see how the Church can stand apart in any meaningful sense. As long as individuals have the freedom and capacity to choose, they can be persuaded by the market to pursue happiness by constructing their own identity through the consumption of goods and services. If consumerism invades all spaces, public and private, where can one even go that stands at a distance from the market? The Church is just one stall among countless others set up in a global marketplace, whether it likes it or not. Second, there’s no obvious way for the Church to critique consumerism without that message being incorporated into consumer culture – any criticism of consumerism can be commodified by the market. I came across a delightful example of this in the course of researching this book. One of the more thoughtful theological engagements with consumerism is Vincent Miller’s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. In the first chapter, Miller addresses the capacity of consumer culture to incorporate and even commodify critiques of itself (Miller 2005: 18). Later, I stumbled upon a striking example of this very phenomenon: a review of Miller’s book in the Journal of Marketing that concludes with the following recommendation: ‘For practitioners [of marketing], Consuming Religion may help develop sensitivity to the potential for offending broad communities of believers through misuse of symbols that others hold sacred’ (McKee 2005: 265). Even a book critical of consumerism can be used as a tool for making its reach more effective. It would seem therefore that the Church faces a false choice since either conformity or resistance leads to the same place: a niche within an overarching consumer culture. The only difference is one approach embraces that niche while the other can’t escape it. Is there really no choice other than for the Church to exist as a lifestyle choice?

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Rhetorics of delight The problem with the approach critics have taken in their attempts to confront consumerism is that it fails to recognize the rhetorical nature of consumerism. Consumerism is treated as an abstract phenomenon, based on free market capitalism, that produces a culture. Few, however, address the role of marketing within consumerism. A striking example of this is Mission-shaped Church, the initiative of the Church of England that explores new ways of being Church within consumer society; not once does the term ‘marketing’, ‘advertising’, or ‘corporation’ appear in that report. As we have seen, however, without the capacity of marketers to saturate society with advertisements, consumerism would collapse (along with all western economies). In short, a pervasive and unremitting rhetoric that seeks to draw people through consumed commodities to market-derived notions of happiness is what produces consumer culture. If rhetoric is the basis for that culture, then rhetoric is also the means by which the Church can confront consumerism. Simply put, the challenge for the Church is how it can meaningfully contest the pervasive rhetoric of lifestyle marketing. As will be demonstrated in this book, ultimately this contest is between competing rhetorical communities of delight. I’ll turn to Augustine of Hippo to explain what I mean by rhetorical communities of delight and to suggest how the Church can more ably engage in mission to a consumer culture. His theology, informed by the rhetorical works of the great Roman orator Cicero, addressed the relationship between emotion and the human will, the dynamics of persuasion, and how delight shapes our perception of freedom and happiness. Augustine’s key insight was that the will is powerfully influenced by whatever delights it but has little control to determine those delights. As will be shown in the next two chapters, Augustine’s rhetorical analysis of salvation provides a theological perspective on the nature of consumerism and the hold it takes on identities and notions of happiness. I’ll begin by examining Cicero’s rhetorical theory before discussing how Augustine incorporated it into his theology to provide what one might consider anachronistically a psychological explanation for the power of sin. I’ll then use his rhetorical analysis of human depravity to examine from a theological perspective the reasons why consumerism so effectively forms and

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shapes individuals and societies. I’ll contend on the one hand that consumerism doesn’t differ from any other form of bondage of the will to sin but on the other that it represents the most pervasive and destructive manifestation of human fallenness the world as yet seen. In Part Two, I’ll return to Augustine to discuss his portrayal of God as a Divine Orator whose Word draws the faithful to salvation through the eloquence of the Holy Spirit. The infusion of God’s own delight through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into the hearts of the faithful (Rom. 5.5) overwhelms the will bound by the chain of worldly delights and enables it to desire and delight in doing God’s will. According to Augustine, God meets and overcomes the false rhetoric of the devil with his own eternal rhetoric, persuading and moving the faithful towards eternal life. But this doesn’t happen in a moment: Augustine applied his rhetorical knowledge to the dynamics of Romans 7 to portray the predicament of the faithful in this life as being like an audience divided between two eloquent orators. Only through the continual outpouring of God’s love and delight are the faithful secured in the rhetoric of God and brought to a point of ‘victorious delight’ in which hearts and wills may at last rest. In Chapter 5, I’ll use Augustine’s rhetorical reading of Romans 7 to provide a theological perspective on the plight of Christians in the age of consumerism. The struggle to hold onto a distinctive Christian identity within a world that constantly seeks to subject all identities to the market is best understood as a rhetorical contest. A market of worldly delights competes with God’s own delight to bind Christians – and others – to its own interests (namely, financial profit). Caught within of this rhetorical contest, Christians experience a dilemma characterized by divided wills and thus fragmented and fragmenting selves. Augustine’s answer to the plight of Christians within consumerism is that God’s own delight overcomes that of the market. This answer provides a way for the Church to approach mission by seeking ways to be open and oriented towards the Eloquent Wisdom of God that roots and forms identities in divine love. The final part of this book explores ways of becoming open to that Eloquent Wisdom. I’ll begin by engaging with recent scholarship on the church within contemporary culture and especially the concept of world views to demonstrate that little account has been taken of how consumerism persuades people to embrace its

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identities and notions of freedom and happiness. Then turning to Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age, James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom, Oliver O’Donovan’s Common Objects of Love, and Robert Dodaro’s Christ and the Just Society, I’ll argue that the Church needs to understand itself as a formative community of rhetoric that depends on God’s wisdom and delight for its mission. The church’s mission then emphasizes the wellsprings of that wisdom and delight within the Church and seeks to reclaim them in creation. The first is achieved by developing habits and practices that root the Christian imagination in divine delight and by conceiving the means of grace (prayer, worship, sacraments, etc.) within the Church as channels of divine delight. The second is achieved by nurturing those places where delight flourishes and opposing those where it’s diminished. I’ll conclude by drawing on Augustine’s On Christian Teaching to present an Augustinian approach to ministry as the active participation in the divine expression of delight. Augustine conceived of teachers and preachers as the orators of the rhetorical community of the Church through whom the Holy Spirit can delight others. Clergy, teachers, preachers, and writers – indeed, to a degree all who minister – are thus theological orators whose work draws others to God or edifies the Church through the eloquence of the Holy Spirit. The threefold Ciceronian imperative, adapted by Augustine, of teaching, delighting, and persuading becomes a guiding principle of the Church’s ministry both in the expression of the gospel to the world and in the formation of the church community. In short, against a culture called into existence by the pervasive rhetoric of marketers, God calls his own orators to be the instruments through whom the Holy Spirit can draw people into his Kingdom by speaking to their deepest longings and desires.

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PART ONE

Worldly rhetoric

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2 Augustine’s rhetoric of self-destruction

Little was more important to Roman society than oratory. Rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking, was an integral part of the traditional Roman educational system and the means for not only preparing aristocratic adolescents for government but also instilling traditional Roman morals (Corbeill 2007: 69–82). Rhetoric greased the machinery of empire: law courts, local and provincial assemblies, the senate, relations between cities, and even popular entertainment relied on it. It was also the bedrock of a shared intellectual culture that spanned an ‘archipelago of cities’ stretching across the Mediterranean world (Brown 1992: 37). A man who mastered rhetoric could become a lawyer, professor, public philosopher, celebrity, senator, or even (in one instance) an emperor. Like a legal or business degree today, a good education in rhetoric was the gateway to the good life. It’s, unsurprising therefore, that Augustine’s father should have sent him away to study rhetoric at the age of seventeen. His family was part of the provincial elite who enjoyed local influence and authority but weren’t otherwise prestigious. If Augustine were to become more than a great man of his home Thagaste, he had to obtain a proper education and patronage. In Augustine’s case, that meant higher education at Carthage, one of the leading centres of rhetoric in the Western empire. If he could excel in the art of rhetoric and demonstrate skill in rhetorical exhibitions and law courts, then he might advance through the ranks of the Roman social hierarchy and improve the status of his family. Augustine writes, ‘My studies which were deemed respectable had the objective of leading me to

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distinction as an advocate in the law courts, where one’s reputation is high in proportion to one’s success in deceiving people’ (CF 3.3.6). At Carthage, he studied the works of Cicero, the great Roman orator whose speeches and rhetorical treatises – Augustine refers to them as ‘books of eloquence’ – were the backbone of Roman education. He was enthralled by Cicero, finding in his writings both an orator and a philosopher who inspired him to aim for lofty ideals. He was formally trained in Cicero’s rhetoric and became fascinated by his Hortensius, a now mostly lost philosophical dialogue on happiness. Augustine writes, ‘The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers… . It gave me different values and priorities’ (CF 3.4.7). Despite this early captivation with the academic philosophy of Cicero, it was in his rhetoric that he excelled – after completing his education he became a rhetor in Carthage for nine years before moving to Rome in 383, at the age of twenty-nine, to continue his teaching there. Like ambitious young men and women today who move to New York or London to advance their careers, Augustine probably hoped his move to Rome would bring him to the attention of powerful people (although he later protested that this wasn’t his main motivation). His chance came in 384 with the invitation to deliver a piece of oratory before the prefect Symmachus, one of the most powerful senators in Rome. He impressed his potential patron sufficiently to be appointed Imperial rhetor in Milan, the great northern Italian city where the western emperor’s court then resided. Augustine now had the opportunity of a lifetime: to work as a kind of PR expert for the beleaguered court of the emperor Justinian II: a remarkable achievement for a young man from a small town in modern-day Algeria. The very fact that he caught the attention of Symmachus and was appointed to such a prominent position at the imperial court suggests that Augustine’s education had paid dividends – it indicates (as did his subsequent career as bishop, preacher, controversialist, and author) that he had excelled in rhetoric and that he was the master of his own subject. Before his conversion to Christianity, he had spent around fifteen years studying, teaching, and practising rhetoric. He may have later scorned that background, but his entire career demonstrates that he never ceased to benefit from it. -o0o-



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Although rhetoric had plenty of critics (and still does), most people in antiquity agreed that it granted skilled practitioners potentially immense power over others. In his classic study of Christianity, persuasion, and Roman culture, Peter Brown writes that rhetoric was accorded the mystique of sorcery: ‘Words were supposed to exercise power over people… . A man of paideia was a man who knew how to command respect, not by violence … but through the potent “spell” of his personal eloquence’ (Brown 1992: 44). Moreover, rhetoric was in many ways the gateway to a better life: since the ability to speak with charm and fluency was one of the hallmarks of the Roman elite, a skilled rhetor was worth his weight in gold to anyone who sought to rise through the social ranks. In many respects, rhetoric had the same mystique as management theory and techniques have today. At the same time, mistrust of rhetoric ran deeply in some quarters of classical intellectual society; it was standard for philosophers to portray rhetoricians as flatterers interested more in self-promotion than in the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. Augustine himself later dismissed rhetoric as little more than the pursuit of ‘human vanity’ and falsehood (e.g. CF 3.3.6). But people like Isocrates and Demosthenes in the East and Cicero in the West were honoured precisely because they’d achieved greatness through their mastery of words. Cicero himself came to personify rhetoric in Latin culture and his orations against the would-be usurper Catiline and later Mark Anthony symbolized the power of eloquence over tyrannical violence. Augustine’s training and experience as a rhetor had therefore immersed him in an intellectual culture that placed high value on the possibility of speech to influence wills – both individual and collective – for the good of the state. More specifically, he’d been schooled in the rhetoric of Cicero from whom he gained an abiding appreciation for pleasure and persuasion as powerful motivational forces. Cicero’s writings instilled in Augustine a keen understanding of how eloquence acts upon the will in ways that shape one’s perceptions and intents. Augustine’s education and experience provided him with ample opportunity to observe how the emotions help to determine beliefs, behaviours, and actions. How many times must Augustine the rhetor have witnessed a skilled orator change the mind of his audience through his eloquence? How many times had he, armed with all the tricks of the trade, done this himself? That

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experience must have given him insights into how impressionable the human will can be – much like how veteran spin doctor must understand the dynamics of public opinion today. In other words, Augustine’s education and work as a rhetor gave him an appreciation for the power of eloquence. What made rhetors different from philosophers is that they studied how emotions could be manipulated to persuade people towards some end. The heart rather than the mind, if you will, was their domain. Success was determined less by convincing people of some truth than by persuading people to do as one wills. This is the reason why philosophers dismissed them as mere flatterers. Within the popular imagination, a skilled orator would just as well convince you to do something stupid as wise because they cared little for truth. In the Greek world, orators were normally called sophists – ‘sophistry’ remains a disparaging term in our own language for people who use specious or false arguments to persuade. All the same, even philosophers had to admit that eloquence had power. There was no denying that the crowds could be tamed by a beautiful speech matched with a thrilling performance. Augustine knew this, and it shaped his theology. As we’ll see in the next few chapters, that influence can be seen most clearly with his notion of delight, which functions within his scheme of salvation in much the same way that eloquence functions within Cicero’s rhetorical theory. Augustine was convinced that delights – be they wholesome or sinful, sensual, or spiritual – have a unique power over human motivation, and he attempted to define that power in ways that are very like Cicero’s view of eloquence: both persuade by pleasing. Cicero discussed the nature and role of eloquence in his influential rhetorical treatises, On Invention, The Ideal Orator, and The Orator. Augustine knew these works well – he likely taught one or more of them to his students – and refers to them either directly or implicitly in many of his writings. In those great rhetorical treatises, Cicero sketched out his ideal orator whose eloquence can direct the wills of others towards their collective good. The great enemy of the ideal orator is the foolish or malevolent man who can use rhetorical charm to persuade people to make decisions that are disastrous for their own prosperity. In both instances, what makes the statesman effective is his eloquence; the health of the republic rests on the capacity of wise and moral statesmen to be more eloquent than demagogues and would-be tyrants.



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From those works, Augustine developed what might be termed as a psychology of sin or a way of explaining the fallen state of humankind that took seriously the unarticulated forces that motivate people to pursue particular ends. This in turn led him, probably unintentionally, to describe redemption as a kind of rhetorical contest between an eloquent God and an eloquent devil. Satan lures sinners to consent to sinful and earthly pleasures through the promise of delight. The experience of these illicit delights in turn binds sinners either to sin or to the world. Sinners delight in their own perdition, just as a captivated audience might delight in agreeing with incompetent or malevolent orators. The dreadful irony of an eloquent devil for Augustine is that people mistake their own bondage for happiness and this subsequently leads them to identify closely with the very things that destroy them. To understand Augustine’s rhetorical theology and to begin to apply this to consumer culture and contemporary ideas of identity, we must therefore begin with Cicero’s own thought. That great ‘man of eloquence’ will be a kind of companion to Augustine throughout this book, and so it’s essential that his rhetorical theory is grasped fully. What will most concern us are his ideas about the role of oratory in the Republic and the nature of eloquence because these are what most informed Augustine’s own theology.

‘The man of eloquence’ Marcus Tullius Cicero lived from 106–43 BCE in the final decades of the Roman Republic. Although he wasn’t from one of the great Roman families, he enjoyed an extraordinarily successful career as a lawyer and a senator, culminating in his defence of the Republic against the armed conspiracy of Catiline and his later defiance of Mark Anthony. When he was later cut down by his political opponents, he left behind an enormous body of rhetorical works – a combination of treatises and transcriptions of his own speeches – that would form the basis for Roman rhetorical education in the West beyond the fall of the Western empire. Quintilian, the great imperial rhetorician, wrote of Cicero, ‘He has gained such esteem among his posterity that Cicero is now less the name of a man than that of eloquence itself. Let us look to him, let us keep him in view as our great example, and let that student to whom Cicero

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has become an object of admiration know that he has made some progress’ (I 10.1.113).1 In the Confessions, Augustine summed him up as ‘a certain Cicero, whose language (but not his heart) almost everyone admires’ (CF 3.4.7). The three key works for understanding Cicero’s rhetorical theory are On Invention, The Ideal Orator, and The Orator. The first is an unfinished handbook on oratory written during Cicero’s precocious adolescence that ironically became his most influential work on rhetoric. The Ideal Orator and The Orator are much more mature attempts at describing his ideal orator – the first was composed in the form of a dialogue between some of the great men of the Roman Republic and the second in the form of a letter to his son. Not given to modesty, Cicero identifies himself in this final work as that ideal and predicted that true oratory would die with the Republic. Most of On Invention is devoted to explaining the technical aspects of public speaking. None of that concerns us here. What does is the prelude to that work, which is a philosophical consideration of oratory and its role within a commonwealth. Cicero begins the prelude by stating the rhetorical issue that would preoccupy him for the rest of his intellectual life: ‘I have often seriously debated with myself whether men and communities have received more good or evil from oratory and a consuming devotion to eloquence’ (OI 1.1). This is, in fact, the same question that had long preoccupied philosophers who, in the main, answered it in the negative. Cicero reached a different conclusion: ‘For my own part, after long thought I have been led by reason itself to hold this opinion first and foremost, that wisdom without eloquence does little for the good of states, but that eloquence without wisdom is generally highly disadvantageous and is never helpful’ (OI 1.1). In other words, philosophy and rhetoric need each other to avoid being either useless or harmful. To illustrate his point, Cicero composed a short myth that begins with primordial humanity existing as little better than scattered brute beasts. They’re stupid, violent, and utterly incapable of grasping the kind of knowledge that builds civilizations. And so, they would have remained had not a good, wise, and eloquent man arisen to gather them together and teach them how to live socially

1

Quintilian 10.1.113.



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and ethically. In a kind of rhetorical version of Beauty and the Beast, this great, primordial orator transformed them ‘from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk’ (OI 1.2). Cicero concludes from his myth that ‘it does not seem possible that a mute and voiceless wisdom could have turned men suddenly from their habits and introduced them to different patterns of life … unless men had been able by eloquence to persuade their fellows of the truth of what they had discovered by reason’ (IO 1.2). The ‘great man’ in the myth is an orator, presented here as an almost messianic figure from whom civilization springs. But great orators do more than form civilizations; they preserve and defend them as well. Within Cicero’s myth, the newly formed civilization continued to depend on the benevolent orator partly because people remained disposed towards savagery and partly because there also arose a would-be tyrant whose foolish or malevolent eloquence sought to undermine the commonwealth for his own benefit. This nightmarish orator was ‘a false copyist of virtue, without any consideration for real duty, arrived at some fluency of language, then wickedness, relying on ability, began to overturn cities, and to undermine the principles of human life’ (OI 1.3). Only the great orator, again armed with wisdom and eloquence, stands against the successors of this false orator, between civilization and chaos. Thus, civil society always depends on the benevolence of wise and eloquent orators. By Cicero’s estimation, a man who arms himself with eloquence in such a manner as not to oppose the advantage of his country, but to be able to contend in behalf of them, appears to me to be one who both as a man and a citizen will be of the greatest service to his own and the general interests, and most devoted to his country. (OI 1.3) Cicero continued this argument in The Ideal Orator, arguably his best developed work on rhetoric. He reprises his myth by having one of the characters in his dialogue ask whether anything other than oratory could have gathered people into a civilized community, established laws, and fostered an appreciation for legal justice (IO 1.33). And once again he states that proper oratory is not only the originator of the state but its preserver as well: the  orator fights against ‘babbling stupidity’ (IO 3.142) to ensure that the

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commonwealth prospers. For this to happen, the orator must be a morally upright person whose personal virtue will ensure that his knowledge and eloquence will be used for the public good – otherwise rhetoric and philosophy produce ‘madmen’ (IO 3.55). Fundamentally for Cicero, true eloquence is the ethical speech of wise and virtuous men for the good of the republic. Understood in this way, eloquence is the foundation and guarantor of a prosperous state because it enables people to be led towards virtue and right action. Without such eloquence humanity either returns to its scattered and savage state or consents to the destructive appeals of charismatic tyrants. In this respect, true orators are the bulwark against violent autocracy. As Thomas Habinek notes in his Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory, ‘The end of tyranny is rhetoric, and vice versa’ (2005: 8). Fundamentally, eloquence is for Cicero the ability through public speech to gain the consent of the people for the benefit of the commonwealth (or one’s client). In The Ideal Orator, one of Cicero’s great men declares, ‘I think nothing is more admirable than being able, through speech, to have hold of people’s minds, to win over their inclinations, to drive them at will in one direction, to draw them at will from another’ (IO 1.30). The orator is the active agent who can manipulate a largely passive or ignorant audience to do as he wills. In that sense, oratory is the means whereby the will of the one (the orator) overcomes the will of the many (the audience). Such sentiment explains why rhetoric was believed to be akin to sorcery – when used effectively it could persuade people to act even against their best interests. One can well understand why Cicero believed that such power had to be united with virtue in order not to be dangerous. Cicero’s three ‘duties of orators’ (officia oratoris) describe the rhetorical process by which orators persuade their audience. In The Ideal Orator he writes, ‘The method employed in the art of oratory … relies entirely on three means of persuasion: proving that our contentions are true, winning over the audience, and inducing their minds to feel any emotion the case may demand’ (IO 2.155). Later in The Orator he repeats the same scheme more forcefully: ‘The man of eloquence whom we seek … will be one who is able to speak … so as to prove, to please and to sway or persuade. To prove is the first necessity, to please is to charm, to sway is victory; for it is one thing of all that avails most in winning



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verdicts’ (O 69). The art of proving, pleasing, and persuading neatly expresses how Cicero understood eloquence. First, an argument or an idea is presented to the audience. By ‘proving’, Cicero means ‘showing’ or ‘presenting’; in law courts this would entail setting out the case to be argued. In and of itself, the presentation is insufficient for convincing an audience because it may be false or unappealing. For the audience to be persuaded, its attention must first be fixed on the orator and his performance and then it must find them both pleasing. These last two tasks are about charm or, to use the term Cicero increasingly favoured, delight (May 1988: 5). Through rhetorical flourish, presentation-style, and appealing ideas and images, the audience is disposed to find the orator and his speech pleasing or delightful. Once delighted, the audience is more likely to give its consent to the appeal. In technical terms, the appeal is based more on pathos (emotions) than logos (logic). Effectively, Cicero argued that eloquent speech causes people to be pleased by whatever they’re persuaded to do or accept. That’s the trick: they must find the proposal pleasing, so that it becomes something they want to do. A truly eloquent speech makes people enjoy the manipulation of their own wills. They come to desire whatever the orator wants and so also to enjoy their wills being driven in one direction and drawn from another. In other words, they don’t agree with the orator through coercion or fear – that’s the way of tyrants – but because they find the speaker and his words pleasing. Indeed, so dependent is eloquence on the speaker and his rhetoric rather than on the ideas expressed that Cicero believed a skilled orator could convince his audience to do almost anything. Indeed, Augustine would reserve some of his sharpest criticism for the perceived ability of master orators to convince people of falsehood (see, for example, CF 3.3.6–7 and 4.2.2). As we’ve already seen, Cicero himself contended that true eloquence is found only in people who are also wise and virtuous. In other people, such ‘fluency of speech’ is potentially destructive. Even so, in practice only motive distinguishes a benevolent orator from a demagogue: otherwise both employ the same rhetorical techniques to achieve the same goal of manipulating the will of their audience. Likewise, Cicero seems to have had a low opinion of an audience’s power to resist such manipulation. The failure of an orator to persuade the crowds to his will is due less to their

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discernment than to his failure to be sufficiently eloquent. In a rhetorical contest, therefore, victory normally goes to the orator (be he wise or wicked) whose demeanour, speech, and emotional appeal is the more pleasing. What ultimately gains consent isn’t manifest truth (as philosophers believed) but the experience and promise of delight.

The rhetoric of salvation In book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine described the final stage of his conversion to Christianity. The book opens with him having accepted intellectually that God doesn’t have a body and that evil doesn’t truly exist (this had led him to reject his earlier Manichaean dualism). Following his encounter with Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, he had studied Catholic doctrine and had come to accept the Nicene Creed. Intellectually, everything was in place for him to become a devoted Christian. But he can’t convince himself to take that decisive step; his mind has been converted but not his heart. As a result, he becomes a man caught between two opposing forces, one seeking to lure him back to his former life and the other towards a Christian identity that includes celibacy: ‘I was sure it was better for me to render myself up to your love than to surrender to my own cupidity. But while the former course was pleasant to think about and had my notional assent, the latter was more pleasant and overcame me’ (CF 8.9.12). Such is his anguish that he finds himself praying, ‘Grant me chastity and abstinence, but not yet’ (CF 8.7.17). The inner conflict he experienced isn’t primarily intellectual – he wasn’t torn between two different ideas, only in need of a convincing argument for him to embrace Christianity wholeheartedly. Rather, he was caught between two competing delights, incapable of embracing the one that delighted him less. Augustine writes, ‘If all these offer equal delight at one and the same time, surely the divergent wills pull apart the human heart while we are deliberating which is the most attractive option to take’ (CF 8.10.24). As long as Christianity seemed less attractive and pleasing than his old life, he couldn’t entirely convert. As he describes himself in the Confessions, the result is the anguish of indecision:



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Vain trifles and the triviality of the empty-headed, my old loves, held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us?’ And ‘from this moment we will never be with you again, not for ever and ever’. And ‘from this moment this and that are forbidden to you for ever and ever’. What they were suggesting is what I have called ‘this and that’ – what they were suggesting, my God, my God, may your mercy avert from the soul of your servant! What filth, what disgraceful things they were suggesting… . They were not frankly confronting me face to face on the road, but as it were whispering behind my back, as if they were tugging at me as I was going away, trying to persuade me to look back. Nevertheless they held me back. I hesitated to detach myself, to be rid of them, to make the leap to where I was being called. Meanwhile the overwhelming force of habit was saying to me: ‘Do you think you can live without them?’ (CF 8.11.26) On one level, Augustine’s vivid description is not unfamiliar. Anybody who has wrestled with unhealthy habits knows of what he speaks. But taken as a whole, the story also reveals a dynamic at work that isn’t unlike the one we’ve seen in Cicero’s rhetorical theory. First, we find two competing cases being made: on the one hand, the Catholic faith presented as the embrace of chastity and the doctrines of the creed, and on the other, his former life presented as the memory of sensual delights (tugging at the ‘garments’ of his flesh). Each case represents a goal towards which he must be persuaded to move. One goal is conversion to the Catholic faith and the other a return to his life of sin and sensual pleasures. In other words, the contest may be moral, even intellectual to a degree, but above all else, it’s rhetorical because it involves persuasion. In that sense, the Catholic faith and his former self can be compared to competing orators making their individual cases to Augustine the subject. Victory will come to the side that’s best able to conquer his will. Second, Augustine himself was in no position to judge each case rationally on its own merits for each case had strong emotional appeal. Nowhere in his account does he say that he found the arguments of Christianity unconvincing or that there was an intellectual merit to the case against his conversion. Rather God

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‘called’ him to the delights of truth and salvation while his former self was ‘suggesting’ sinful or worldly delights. In fact, the strength of arguments made by his former self are rooted in pathos because they appeal to his emotions rather than to his intellect. But the same is equally true for Christianity – its truth had already failed to persuade Augustine to adopt a new way of living. The battleground is therefore located in his heart rather than his mind. In other words, his conversion to Christianity when it came wasn’t a victory of the intellect over his emotions but a conversion of the heart to a more appealing Christian faith. In the end, he would become a Christian because it pleased him more; the will would be conquered more by delight than by truth. To convert Augustine fully, Christian truth had to be more eloquent than sinful falsehood. Third, part of his anguish was due to his not beginning on a level playing field since sinful ‘delights’ had long since chained him to old habits, making it even harder for him to be moved by the heavenly delights. This introduces to Augustine’s scheme the notion of freedom and bondage: to convert to the Christian faith represented freedom from bondage to sin. Thus, the goal of God’s rhetoric was to persuade Augustine to embrace his own freedom while the goal of the devil’s rhetoric was to persuade him to remain in bondage to the corrupt habits he loved. The notion of habit, as will be seen, is a key facet of Augustine’s rhetorical theology. Finally, the result of this rhetorical contest between sin and salvation is that he became a man with a divided will, torn in two competing directions, unable fully to be persuaded by the Christian doctrine he had come notionally to accept. He was not unlike an audience caught between two proficient orators uncertain what to do because of the competing displays of eloquence. And because his will was divided, he was incapable on his own to move towards truth even though he had sufficiently converted to resist an immediate return to his old ways. As a result, he was caught in a dilemma of anguish felt most exquisitely for him in his struggle with his sexual drive. What we see in Augustine’s self-presentation is the inner psychology of salvation described in terms that have a rhetorical undertone. Sin and salvation each present a case that can’t be embraced on their own merits. Like good orators, they employ their eloquence to delight Augustine to consent to their proposition. His decision to remain on the path to damnation or to begin the journey



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to salvation is based on which is more appealing and delightful. The more eloquent of the two will eventually drive his will in the direction it pleases; until then, he remains largely a passive agent, who’s unable to do more than be tormented by his competing desires. -o0oIn Chapters 4 and 5, we’ll examine this rhetorical contest of salvation over the will and how Augustine perceived God as overcoming the eloquence of sin. For now, we’ll take a closer look at Augustine’s psychology of sin and how that connects with self-identity and notions of freedom and bondage. His detailed description of that psychology, found in book 1 of his commentary The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, sheds further light on his account of his conversion in the Confessions; it’s also suggestive of his Ciceronian turn of mind. Augustine wrote The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount a few years before the Confessions during a period shortly after his conversion but before his consecration as a bishop. It’s by and large an ethical work based on an interpretation of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. While the whole work is thought-provoking and arguably neglected, what’s of particular interest is Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the account in Genesis of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. For Augustine, the account of the Fall can be understood as signifying the process of committing sins: For, there are three steps toward the complete commission of a sin: suggestion, delight, and consent. The suggestion is made either through the memory or through the bodily sense – when we are seeing or hearing or smelling or tasting or touching something. If we take pleasure in the delight of this, it must be repressed if the delight is sinful … if consent is given, then a sin is fully committed in the heart, and it is known to God. (LSM 1.12.34)2 There are two things to note about this passage. The first is that it provides a theological description for Augustine’s conversion in

(In Jepson’s translation, pleasure rather than delight is used, though in each case, a variation on the Latin delectatio (delight) is used.) 2

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book 8 of the Confessions. One is tempted to say that he had this in mind when he wrote that account. In both works, sin ‘suggests’ itself through memory or the senses (‘garments of the flesh’) and achieves victory through delight. People don’t sin out of fear or necessity. They want to sin because they have been convinced that they’ll delight in it. Delight itself persuades. The second thing to note is the process itself: suggestion, delight, and persuasion. For a person to consent to a sinful act, he or she must first be presented with the sinful idea and then sufficiently charmed by that idea (or its fruits) to be persuaded to consent to it. The goal of the suggestion and delight is to gain the person’s consent, to persuade them to commit the sin. In effect, sin has to be eloquent – it has to prove, please, and persuade – in order for the will to consent to it. There’s nothing in Augustine’s psychology of sin that Cicero wouldn’t have recognized. But then Augustine adds a key element to his understanding of sin: habit. Following his description of the suggestion, delight, and consent involved in committing sins, he argues: If [the person] then goes so far as to perform the corresponding act, the craving seems to be satisfied and extinguished, but a more intense pleasure is enkindled when the suggestion is repeated afterwards. The pleasure, however, is far less than that which has turned into a habit by continuous acts, for it is very difficult to overcome this habit. (LSM 1.12.34) The delight of a sin never lives up to its billing; no sooner is a sin enjoyed than its delight fades, leaving the subject craving for more. The longing to taste that delight again then leads to an endless cycle of suggestion, delight, and consent. It becomes habitual or, to use Augustine’s own term, a chain (cf. LSM 1.12.34–5). And this chain of sinful delights becomes increasingly hard to break; the will is further bound to sin, craving the delight that will never satisfy. Saying ‘no’ to the enjoyment of the sin becomes all but impossible. This is a remarkably modern description of the ‘law of diminishing returns’ or what we would call addiction. For Augustine, fallen humanity is addicted to sin. Here we have a way of understanding the Pauline image of humanity in bondage to sin that’s rooted in rhetoric: the devil governs humanity like an eloquent demagogue his people.



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Augustine’s later image of a person so addicted always makes me think of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings: So it [the will] turns away from him [God] and slithers and slides down into less and less which is imagined to be more and more, it can find satisfaction neither in itself nor in anything else as it gets further away from him who alone can satisfy it. So it is that in its destitution and distress it becomes excessively intent on its own actions and the disturbing delights it culls from them. (T 10.7) Like Gollum and the One Ring, our sins become our ‘Precious’ that we can’t live without even though they fail to satisfy our deepest hunger and turn us away from God. In effect, we identify with the sinful delights that are reducing us to pitiful monsters. -o0oThe rhetoric of sin persuades sinners to embrace their own bondage to death just as the rhetoric of Cicero’s charismatic demagogues persuades the people to embrace their own ruin. But this then raises the question of why delight acts so powerfully over the will. Why do people find delights so hard to resist? Augustine’s answer is found in his concept of love. For him, delight is a mysterious force that commands our affections and glues us through love to the thing that pleases us. He states quite boldly that ‘One only loves … what delights one’ (S 159.3). So, when we delight in something – be it wholesome or sinful – we effectively fall in love with it. That love shapes who we are at our deepest level. The intimate connection with love is an essential part of Augustine’s understanding of delight. In the Confessions, he declares, ‘My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me’ (C 13.9.10). By that, he means that our loves act gravitationally on us, either raising us towards God or weighing us down to hell. In other words, delight is either like a flame that heats the air that carries a balloon higher or like a heavy ballast that causes it to sink. Our delights facilitate movement to and from God, causing us to enjoy either our salvation or our perdition. As Augustine states in his On Music, ‘Delight is like the weight of the soul. And so delight sets the soul in its place. “For where your

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treasure is, there your heart will be also”’ (OM 6.29). Delight sets the souls in its place. That’s a remarkable claim because it suggests that delight determines who we are. This statement becomes even more striking when you consider that Augustine believed that we have little control over what delights us. In his letter to Simplicianus, he asks, ‘Who can welcome in his mind something that does not give him delight? But who has it in his power to ensure that something that will delight him will turn up, or that he will take delight in what turns up’ (TS 1.2.21)? He intends two things by these questions: first, that unless something delights us we probably won’t even notice it – proper attention requires a degree of delight. Second, we can’t make these delightful things appear or even ensure that we’ll enjoy them if they do. Rather, something suddenly delights us powerfully before we can begin to articulate the question, ‘why’ or even ‘where did that come from?’ As Peter Brown notes in his biography of Augustine, delight is not unlike falling in love (1969: 155). Augustine’s keen, rhetorical eye perceived how little we control what delights us. Recall Cicero’s statement about an orator driving wills. He goes on to argue that the orator accomplishes this by seducing his audience into being pleased by whatever he wants them to. That, in effect, is what persuasion is: bringing people around to the speaker’s point of view through eloquence rather than by force. From Cicero’s perspective, the orator is in control rather than the audience. That’s the power of charm: being successfully swayed is such a pleasurable experience that we don’t mind if our wills are manipulated – just like the subjects of the research about the ‘Pepsi Challenge’. In fact, because it feels good, the experience leaves us with a sense of freedom because we have been convinced that we’re doing as we please. Indeed, normally when we speak of freedom what we really mean is that we are free to do as we please. Augustine’s response is to say yes, but we don’t have nearly the control over what pleases us that we like to think. Hidden motivational forces are disposing us towards certain delights and away from others – delight operates most powerfully behind the scenes among these subconscious, un-reflexive motivational forces. We normally take as little notice of these delights as a charmed audience does of the eloquence of a superb speaker – we just go where the delights take us.



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A personal story may clarify Augustine’s logic. There’s little I enjoy more than hiking in the mountains. This has been true of me ever since I was swept up by a kind of passionate delight while walking in the Appalachian Mountains. That experience was entirely unexpected; I didn’t go up into the mountains to be overwhelmed by that delight. Something drew me there, the delight sprang upon me unexpectedly, and I responded without much thought. I now feel freest and happiest whenever I’m trekking in a mountain wilderness. I didn’t calculatingly choose that delight among a shopping list of potential pleasures. The same is true for my other loves, be it cooking, landscape photography, or teaching. Did I choose these delights or did they choose me? Augustine would say that they largely chose me. I can say the same thing about those other pleasures in my life that I never chose and which I may even find repugnant but that I still find desirable. Just because I don’t think they’re right doesn’t take away their promise of delight. Nor did I choose them as the delights I must try to resist. I’m drawn to them for some mysterious reason (while finding those that tempt others entirely unappealing) and in many cases can’t change that fact. As in Augustine’s account from his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, once the suggestion delights me, I can only consent or withhold that consent. Normally, I can’t choose not to see their potential for delight. So, according to Augustine, delight goes right to the heart of our sense of freedom and our identity. We feel most free and most ourselves when we get to do whatever most delights us. Any other kind of activity feels onerous, painful, or enforced, even if we think it’s something we ought to do. Our sense of freedom and of our true self is bound up inextricably in our pleasures: ‘let me do as I please’ is a kind of shorthand way for saying, ‘let me be me’. But for the most part, we didn’t choose the delights that shape our sense of freedom – in fact, like me, you may have a list of things you wish did delight you but don’t. Instead, most of these delights chose us. We typically follow where they lead without concerning ourselves too much about how they may be influencing our lives, beliefs, and our choices. That’s the genius of Augustine’s rhetorical theology and perhaps provides some explanation for why he came to hold so firmly to the idea of the bondage of the will. We like to think of ourselves as free agents. We like to think of ourselves as in control. But Augustine

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would advise us, I think, not to kid ourselves. Delights have shaped who we are by disposing us towards making some choices while avoiding others, which, in turn, limit the choices we can make in the present – these too are being shaped by the delights that even now charm us. Certainly, we might be free agents if we were able to catalogue and rationally weigh our delights, but Augustine seems to have had little confidence in our capacity to do so. In his view, as we have seen, we’re already enslaved to delights, and not just any delights, but especially those that ultimately dehumanize us. Left to our own devices, sinful, illicit delights continue to draw us inexorably to our ruin. The problem raised by Augustine’s understanding of the uncontrollable nature of delight is that it seems to make humankind impotent. Could it be that people are under the spell of capricious delights, unable to do more than hope that wholesome ones will come their way unexpectedly? Is humankind defenceless against a rhetoric of self-destruction? Augustine’s answer is no. God doesn’t leave people in that predicament but only because he enters the scene himself to challenge the devil rhetorically. How he conceived of that happening will be the subject of Chapter 4. But before we turn to Augustine’s description of spiritual delights, we must return to the present to see how his understanding of sinful delights and their influence over our perception of freedom and identity sheds theological light on the nature of consumerism and the power it holds over us.

3 The rhetoric of consumerism

Consumerism – A rare intellectual defence One of the few intellectuals to defend consumer culture is the British philosopher A. C. Grayling. In a 2001 column for The Guardian, he described the case for consumerism as ‘exhilaratingly robust’ (Grayling 2001). He begins his column by stating the sociological arguments against consumer culture: Sociological orthodoxy says that consumerism is oppression; skilful marketing people have manipulated us into a state of passive victimhood, endlessly and aimlessly consuming everincreasing amounts at the behest of an advertising industry which creates false desires in us by making us believe that to purchase an object is to purchase paradise. Grayling’s two arguments against these criticisms are that ‘evidence’ proves that ‘shopping is a profound source of meaning in the modern world’ and that consumers are actually in control ‘while the producers and advertisers scamper after them, supplying the consolations and salvations (religious language springs naturally to mind) that brand names and the joys of ownership provide’. In short, Grayling believes that consumerism endows democratic society with the resources for individuals to construct meaning free from constraints. He even recognizes the religious undertones of consumerism: The language of products and services is the shared language of our community. Logos and advertisements are the cultural

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emblems of our time, signposts that help us navigate our world and evaluate what we meet in it. Both the language and the images offer what religion once did – a common structure. But as a community bond it is … more democratic and equitable. For consumers are not fools, not victims of dogmas taught by a priesthood. They are their own priests; they know what they want, and they are getting it. This is heady stuff, firmly entrenched in the grand vision of the Enlightenment that people should control their own destiny. He does, however, conclude on a more sombre note, admitting that despite its many virtues consumerism can’t provide ‘all the things worth having in life, such as kindness, wisdom, and the human affections’. Grayling’s later book, The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century, suggests that this last hesitation didn’t keep him up at night. The book uses as its guiding metaphor the story from Greek mythology in which the hero Hercules is given a choice by two women. A wise woman offers him a life of struggle and arduous work rewarded by everlasting renown, while a voluptuous woman offers him a life of pleasure, ease, and entertainment (Grayling 2007: 12). Although in the original story, Hercules makes the nobler choice and thus gains immortal fame, what really matters for Grayling isn’t Hercules’ high-minded decision but simply the fact that he could make a life choice. In short, the essential ingredient for the good life is the opportunity to choose that life for oneself. Grayling writes, ‘It follows not merely that there is no single formula for encapsulating what life’s pleasures are, but – more importantly – that there should not be, though philosophers have plunged themselves into trouble by trying to legislate about both’ (Grayling 2007: 15). From the proposition that choice is the key to fulfilment Grayling builds his case for how people can best pursue the good life, which consists of breaking free from systems of oppression so that one can individually choose both the narrative (‘one’s autobiography’ (Grayling 2007: 27)) that provides meaning and the life goals for which to aim. ‘The meat of the matter, of course, lies in the question of what goals to choose. Whatever they are, they will be chosen because they are or embody the values, desires, hopes and forms of self-definition which, by selecting and living in accordance with



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them, constitute life’s meaning’ (Grayling 2007: 27). For people to be able to embark on this fulfilling journey, they need personal autonomy and minds released from the prisons of ‘convention, religion, ignorance, laziness’ (Grayling 2007: 28). People should especially reject traditional moralities based on religion in favour of ones in which ‘the good life is individually something chosen and built, and … autonomy is its distinctive mark’ (Grayling 2007: 49). What might Augustine say in response to Grayling? I imagine he would press Grayling precisely on the point of choice and free agency. How do you know, he might ask, that you’re really choosing truly your own meaning and not what others have convinced you is meaningful? Do people really choose their pleasures to pursue? Did Grayling rationally choose to be a philosopher rather than something more useful like a dentist, or did the delight he encountered in philosophy compel him to become one? Did he even rationally choose the beliefs his book promotes, or does he rather fancy imagining himself to be a freely choosing agent? Augustine would say that Grayling is fooling himself if he thinks his narrative is his own or that his choices are free from constraints. And he would probably point out that Grayling’s supposedly unfettered choices were to some degree compromised and manipulated before he even began to consider them. His delights powerfully disposed him towards making some choices while rejecting others. In fact, those delights made him, and continue to make him, aware of some choices and oblivious to others. While it might be unfair to describe Grayling’s ethics as consisting of autonomous individuals shopping for happiness, his understanding of the good life is inconceivable without consumerism. His ethical framework depends on a market economy that can produce enough commodities for people to construct freely their bespoke good life. Take away their choice of goods, their disposable income, and the leisure to enjoy them and suddenly the good life doesn’t look so achievable. Grayling’s ethics are at best meaningless and at worst insulting to low income people or the vast majority of people who live in the developing world. But even for those with ready access to goods, Grayling’s idea of personal freedom still turns out to be fantasy. We’ve already seen how the rhetoric of mass marketing deliberately seeks to shape our identities by segmenting society into tribes based on shared styles of consumption. Marketers use advanced techniques based

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on extensive consumer behaviour research to achieve their goal. We may live in a marketplace with varying degrees of freedom for making choices, but those choices are only between different styles of consumption designed and promoted to influence and express identities in order to make a profit. Grayling seems to believe that individuals stand above consumer culture, eyeing their choices with a degree of detachment. This view is a common conceit among those who think that people can actively ‘construct’ their own identity as though somehow emotionally removed from their choices and desires. As we’ve seen, however, this isn’t how consumers normally experience life – the market not only presents us with choices but also influences how we respond to them. Take, for example, the conclusion to a recent empirical study into the ways society shapes how we view our bodies: The postmodern consumer is an optimistic theoretical construction, because it implies that each of us can select identities at will from the catalog of cultural images – identities that can be ‘worn’ and then discarded, free from any sense of anxiety or uncertainty. This conception, however, seems far removed from the self-understandings expressed by the consumers in this study. They sought to cope with disconcerting physical changes that could not simply be chosen away. They negotiated disparities between their current status and the often idealized conceptions of the normalized body. They saw their bodies as living records of their life histories and consumption habits. (Thompson and Hirschman 1995: 151) Similar observations could be made about a great many of our choices. Marketers know the capacity of the market to shape identity. Their discipline is built on the work of social psychologists, like those we met in the first chapter, into how the consumption of images influences our perception of reality. Our conception of happiness and how we achieve it are shaped by the market before we even begin to think about our choices. Indeed, the number of articles and books about how to market one’s products as attractive tools for people to construct their identities is vast. Grayling’s use of the choice of Hercules is therefore inaccurate because it implies that individuals are like heroes standing above mere mortals. As Wendell Berry notes,



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Ordinary behaviour belongs to a different dramatic mode, a different understanding of action, even a different understanding of virtue … because ordinary behaviour lasts so much longer than heroic action, it raises in a more complex and difficult way the issue of perseverance. It may, in some ways, be easier to be Samson than to be a good husband or wife day after day for fifty years. (Berry 1981: 276–7) If we wish to turn the choice of Hercules into a metaphor for late modern individuals, we would need to imagine the society in which Hercules lived disposing him powerfully to accept the offer of immediate gratification and pleasure and to reject the deferred reward of the wise woman. We would need also to surround him with a veritable army of voluptuous women armed with data and analyses for devising effective ways to persuade him to accept their offer. In theory, Hercules would be free to make his momentous choice but really his background and a wealth of carefully crafted strategies would strongly dispose him not even to notice the wise woman. Finally, after being persuaded by the easy life, he would discover that the promised rewards never appeared, that fulfilment always lay beyond his reach, and that he could not now easily choose a different life. But then we would have left behind the unrealistic world of Hercules and Grayling and entered into Augustine’s.

The marketing republic To see this more clearly, let’s begin by considering consumerism from the perspective of Cicero. Recall that within the Roman republic, rhetoric was the means by which Rome expressed its self-understanding, defended its values, and defied those who would undermine it from within. Cicero upheld the centrality of rhetoric in the political life of Rome by presenting oratory as the basis for civilization – only it has the capacity to form civilization and withstand those who would destabilize or overthrow it. For the republic to endure, the senate and people of Rome had to be persuaded regularly to support policies that benefited the state and oppose those that were potentially calamitous. Consumerism depends on skilled marketing and advertising in much the same way as Roman republic did on skilled oratory. Like

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Cicero’s orators, advertisers aim to be ‘able, through speech, to have hold people’s minds, to win over their inclinations, to drive them at will in one direction, to draw them at will from another’ (IO 1.30). Like ancient orators, they seek to influence people through charm and eloquence rather than rational argument. Their eloquence lies in their style of delivery, their knowledge about the intended audience, and the countless ways they can remind consumers of the happiness they desire. Like Roman rhetoric too, marketing greases the machinery of society: it’s how goods are promoted, politicians get elected, social reforms are conducted, religions evangelize, and people convince employers to hire them. Western prosperity depends on the relentless persuasion of citizens to shop; consumer economies can’t grow and develop unless individuals have the confidence and the means to consume constantly. For that to happen, people must also be convinced that shopping is necessary for self-understanding and self-expression. ‘Consumers … use brands to “produce” an identity via purchase, display, and use; our branded selves can then be “consumed” by others as a mark of who we perceive ourselves to be and which social groups we wish to belong to’ (Ellis 2011: 179). To accomplish this, consumer culture manufactures desires that only commodities can satisfy – frugality and contentment aren’t virtues within consumer society. Personal dissatisfaction, therefore, isn’t a by-product of consumerism but the very essence of it. A contented public would be the ruin of Western economies. The rhetoric of the market must therefore undermine people’s self-satisfaction in order to ensure that they’ll continue to consume. Billions of dollars are spent on consumer behaviour research to find new methods for convincing people that they’ve yet to find true happiness and that they have needs yet unmet. Consumer research is, if you will, the means for ensuring that people remain restless and marketing persuasive. In Consuming Life, Zygmunt Bauman argues that consumerism ‘is a type of social arrangement that results from recycling mundane, permanent, and so to speak “regime-neutral” human wants, desires, and longing into the principal propelling and operating force of society’ (2007: 28). But, he further notes, the happiness we pursue is associated less with the gratification of needs than with the ‘rising volume and intensity of desire… . New needs need new commodities; new commodities need new needs and desires; the advent of consumerism augurs the era of “inbuilt obsolescence” of



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goods offered on the market and signals a spectacular rise in the waste-disposal industry’ (2007: 31). The manufacturing of these desires is the work of marketing and advertising. As we have seen already, the volume and intensity of desire are sustained by relentlessly reminding people of the goal to which they can direct those desires: a market-derived good life. Life can be just a little better with a new purchase: a new car, dress, pair of shoes, or gadget. As Bauman observes (drawing on the work of Harvie Ferguson), marketers conjure ‘wishful fantasies’ for people to live out through self-identities that are increasingly liberated from reality (Bauman 2000: 75). Bauman concludes: Now it is desire’s turn to be discarded. It has outlived its usefulness: having brought consumer addiction to its final state, it can no more set the pace. A more powerful, and above all more versatile stimulant is needed to keep consumer demand on a level of consumer offer. The ‘wish’ is that much needed replacement: it completes the liberation of the pleasure principle, purging and disposing the last residues of the ‘reality principle’ impediment. (Bauman 2000: 75–6) The market becomes our reality – we wear or discard its identities based on subjective feelings about ourselves and often regardless of their relation to the real world (Polanyi 2001:71–80). And these fantasies aren’t determined by their merits but by their profitability – from the market’s perspective, one might as well self-identify as a Jedi Knight or Goth as anything rooted in the world outside mass media. Like all commodities their value is determined by their potential to generate cash. As Eugenia Siapera notes, ‘The more profit an identity can generate the higher it is valued. Conversely, the less profit an identity can generate the more invisible and marginalized it becomes’ (2010: 143). Unlike Cicero’s republic, however, consumer society is awash with rhetoric: it brims with thousands of marketers ranging from local practitioners to major global marketing firms such as WPP and the Omnicom Group. Advertising accounts for around 20 per cent of the United States’ GDP. Whereas a citizen of Cicero’s republic would have heard grand oratory only occasionally, the typical American comes within the reach of as many as ten thousand advertisements every day (SJ Insights, 30 September 2014). Within

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our society rhetoric never ceases; there’s no escape from the continual attempt to influence how we perceive reality and how we understand ourselves within it. What reality can there possibly now be that isn’t to some extent influenced by the countless versions of it we encounter daily? Finally, mass marketing represents the kind of ruinous rhetoric against which Cicero warned because it orients society towards calamitous ends. The ecological costs of maintaining our rhetorical community are immense: accelerating climate change, toxic wastelands, mountains of waste, and mass extinction. A 2013 report for the United Nations determined that when environmental costs are factored in, almost no industry is in fact profitable.1 Another study determined that consumer economies account for 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emission and 50–80 per cent of total resource use (Ivanova et al. 2016). Even a textbook of marketing admits that ‘our glittering consumer society’ depends on the availability of cheap consumer goods produced in places ‘where labour is cheap, where people are forced to work very long hours, and where the legal protection of workers is minimal’ (Ellis 2010: 47). But part of the market’s rhetoric consists of dissuading people from considering or caring about the long-term consequences of their consumption (Roberts 2015: 62–87). Consequently, consumer culture is marked by a short-termism that resists attempts to impose constraints since this would also reduce the range of choices by which people define freedom and understand themselves. Grayling’s world of unfettered choices turns out to have severe consequences. The reality is that we can only inhabit our manufactured identities and pursue the desired fantasies of the market by also destroying the real world.

‘Inform, engage, and delight’ As we saw in the previous chapter, Augustine incorporated much of Cicero’s theory of civic rhetoric into his understanding of the

“natural_capital_at_risk_the_top_100_externalities_of_business_Trucost.pdf,” accessed 2 April 2017, http://www.greengrowthknowledge.org/sites/default/ files/downloads/resource/natural_capital_at_risk_the_top_100_externalities_of_ business_Trucost.pdf. 1



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dynamics of redemption. The devil binds sinners to himself through seduction rather than coercion – and this seduction manifests itself in a form of rhetoric that draws people towards their own destruction. Satan persuades sinners to consent to his diabolical suggestions through delight. Once they consent to the suggestion and experience sin’s delight, they long to relive the experience repeatedly, even though they can never manage it. Part of the power of these delights is that they appeal to our senses – Augustine calls this our lower nature – and the exquisite nature of that experience undercuts the spiritual delights that would otherwise draw us to God. We more readily delight in salacious gossip or over-indulgence than in prayer and contemplation. As a result, sinners turn away from God through their addiction to sinful and worldly delights, and slither away like Gollum towards wickedness. Even so, there’s just enough delight to make this dehumanization somewhat gratifying – the road to hell is paved with good feelings. As we’ll see later, this viewpoint didn’t set Augustine against pleasure; he wasn’t a Puritan in a toga. He believed that the roads to both hell and heaven are paved with pleasure. But he was also convinced that human sinfulness disposes men and women to notice the pleasures on the road to hell more than those on the road to heaven. Sinful human nature and society (not to mention the active work of the devil) act powerfully on the human will, persuading people to embrace their own destruction. The diabolical rhetoric is therefore social because it underpins the world in which people live and individual because it presents itself in the delights men and women experience in their daily lives. Men and women face a veritable army of delights pulling their hearts in one direction or the other. The world of delights in which human beings find themselves consists of worldly, spiritual, lawful, and sinful delights. In theory, these delights might be considered equal in force, each one acting on our desires and our wills to consent to the pleasure they offer. In reality, however, Augustine believed that our individual corruption and a society oriented towards pride and violence inure people to spiritual delights and attract them to worldly and often unlawful delights. In other words, sin produces a disposition that weights the scale in its own favour. We can see a similar dynamic in other contexts of our lives. For example, a Southern Republican will likely be disposed to listen to the rhetoric of those opposed to gay

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marriage or a California Democrat will likely be disposed to listen to the rhetoric of gun control advocates. In both cases, the person can hear the opposing rhetoric and theoretically has the capacity to weigh the arguments. In reality, he or she has been disposed by context to accept one and reject the other. Augustine believed this same dynamic is at play morally in the human condition – the fallen nature of humankind biases people towards the devil’s rhetoric. The devil’s eloquence is found in his capacity to suggest, delight, and consent. Likewise, marketing can be seen to limit human freedom and flourishing through a kind of bondage achieved through a rhetorical process of suggestion, delight, and consent. This process of persuasion is the means whereby consumer culture binds people to their vocation-as-consumers and locks them into ways of perceiving the world and themselves that can be monetized. Given the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of marketing, there’s little room for escape from this process of persuasion. So, to claim that consumerism is an example of a rhetorical society is also to argue that it involves the processes of suggestion, delight, and consent for the production of profit. Consumerism’s rhetoric effectively monopolizes sources of delight so that people are disposed to be pleased by whatever the market wills: be that movies and television, computer games, fashion, organized athletics, cars, gadgets, or a multitude of other manufactured delights. As a result, consumers perceive freedom primarily in terms of their capacity to enjoy delights that the market can mass produce. This then becomes the contemporary manifestation of Augustine’s diabolical rhetoric and the form that human bondage to death and corruption takes in our own times. Let’s begin to look more closely at how this process works within consumerism by considering first what Augustine’s suggestion looks like within the rhetoric of consumerism. At its most obvious level, this suggestion is information. Marketers view their role as informing customers of the products they need – they are, in a sense, matchmakers between producers and consumers. All commercial advertising displays commodities (goods and services) for people to consider consuming. We must be told that the commodity exists for us to consider buying it. The first responsibility of a marketer is therefore to inform. But good advertising does more than inform. Old adverts might have focused their attention on the technical specifications



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of their products, but this approach is rarely taken today except for more technical goods (e.g. my backpacking catalogues abound in technical details (weight, material, capacity, etc.) of a variety of outdoor goods). As we saw at the start of the book, the adverts for the truck and the lipstick offered no information about their products other than what was already obvious. Instead, information is presented in a manner deemed persuasive by advertisers. This idea is fundamental to marketing as can be seen, for example, in an introductory book to advertising: Many people, usually critics hostile to advertising, have tried to draw a distinction between informative advertising and persuasive advertising. The former is deemed to be acceptable and desirable, the latter to be less acceptable or even totally unacceptable. In reality the line between information and persuasion is impossible to draw. All the information an advertiser includes in an advertisement is intended to be persuasive (unless it is there because it is legally necessary). (Fletcher 2010: 2) So, the suggestion made by marketers can be defined as information tailored to persuade. The information we’re given about commodities isn’t meant to be an object for dispassionate consideration. It’s an intentionally biased presentation: all product information has been manipulated in some way (perhaps by highlighting some features over against others) with an intended audience in mind. Only legal regulation limits what can be claimed about products. In order to tailor information, marketers must thoroughly study their intended audience. The Internet has revolutionized this aspect of marketing, providing them mountains of data about our habits and interests gleaned from social media, search engines, and cookies (Turow 2011). So, for example, the creators of the truck commercial probably didn’t waste too much time thinking about how to appeal to cosmopolitan women and those of the lipstick commercial probably never thought about how their message might appeal to male construction workers (and this sentence alone shows how quickly such an approach resorts to profiling). Instead, they undoubtedly analysed the data of their intended market in order to ensure that their adverts targeted them effectively. The information is meant to be suggestive, to get us to think about the product in a favourable light so that we’ll be inclined to purchase it.

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Information tailored to persuade, however, is itself typically couched within stories designed to persuade. One of the best ways to make people receptive to information is to engage them with a story. This might be nothing more than a series of images for our imagination to weave together into a narrative (Lippmann’s ‘medium of fictions’). So, even though the truck commercial consists of a series of unrelated snapshots, our mind knits them together to form a story of happy family life in the American Midwest. Indeed, the truck advert doubles as a promotion for the good life in Middle America. Products can also be subtly worked into other narratives: a famous example is the use of Reese’s Pieces in E.T., which caused a 300 per cent increase in sales (Linsdström 2009: 44–5). Again, these narratives don’t tell us anything about how the product should be used (it’s unlikely any of us will be called upon to lure an abandoned alien out of hiding). They’re intended to present reality in a way that casts the commodity in the most positive light possible: the truck associated with rugged but wholesome living and the lipstick associated with a happy cosmopolitan lifestyle. Such stories are really fantasies that don’t even pretend to be about the real world but instead appeal to the audience’s fondest dreams – a kind of storybook version of the good life. Finally, as already noted, the pervasiveness of marketing means we live in a constant state of suggestion. If we’re exposed to around ten thousand advertisements every day, then we’re rarely free from marketers suggesting that we spend our money or take advantage of their offer. Augustine imagined diabolical suggestions coming at crisis moments: instances when we’re presented by particular temptations. But we live in a world of constant temptation. We may, in fact, be inured to the great majority of these attempts – and studies show that we don’t register most of them at any conscious level – but the mere fact of their constant presence shapes our reality. There’s an enormous difference between a society where persuasive fantasies are ever-present and one where they aren’t. In such a world, choice becomes an inescapable burden rather than an act of freedom. In Bauman’s words, bombarded from all sides by suggestions that they need to equip themselves with one or other shop-supplied product if they want to gain and retain the social standing they desire, perform their social obligations and protect their self-esteem – as well as be



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seen and recognized as doing all that – consumers of both sexes, all ages and every social standing will feel inadequate, deficient and substandard unless they promptly answer the calls. (Bauman 2007: 55–6) And even if we choose not to shop, we must make that choice repeatedly – we’re like alcoholics trapped in a distillery choosing not to accept the constant offer to enjoy a drink. Because we live in a society filled with commercial appeals, marketers are faced with an incredibly challenging task: how to make people notice. They must figure out how to make their adverts or brands stand out from the rest. The difficulty in accomplishing this task is part of the reason people like Grayling argue that consumers are in control while marketers chase after them. Billions of dollars are poured into researching behaviours, tastes, attitudes, and aspirations in order to find the particular angle that will unlock the key to people’s desires and fantasies. A substantial majority of these attempts fail and very few succeed at the level of Apple, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks. But Grayling and others fail to appreciate that marketers are competing only against each other. They may have to chase after consumers but it’s not like those consumers are actively searching for alternative ways of expressing themselves or pursuing happiness. Eventually, some marketers will connect their products with consumers – or rather, many marketers will catch different segments of consumers like fishers dragging their nets in competition for the same school of fish. Marketing failures don’t result in people pursuing happiness and the good life in ways that aren’t monetized. The failure of Pepsi to profit from their taste test didn’t cause people stop and question the role of marketing in their lives – they just drank Coke instead. The rhetoric of the market presents itself as the guardian of happiness and fulfilment. People may have thousands of possible choices available, but all of those choices are only found within the market. Nor are these choices equally weighted. Each has been designed and tailored to appeal to an intensively and extensively studied public. What makes particular choices stand out from the rest is their capacity to connect emotionally with their audience. Emotion charges information and stories with potency. The heart rather than the mind is the object of their appeal. So, for example, the reason for Pepsi’s failure and Coca-Cola’s success is that the

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latter succeeded better in connecting emotionally with consumers. Both presented information and stories tailored to persuade, but Coca-Cola was far more successful in connecting their information with people’s emotions. Not even the taste test could undermine the goodwill generated by campaigns like ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke.’ Delight is the key to connecting emotions with information and stories intended to persuade. Grabbing our attention is the first task of delight, as Augustine’s notes in On Christian Teaching: ‘A hearer must be delighted so that he can be gripped and made to listen’ (CT 4.12.28). Delight has the capacity to make us stop and notice as well as fix our attention. If marketers can find ways to delight their audience, they can grab hold of people’s attention long enough to influence their choices. Marketers must therefore consider how their appeal will stand out not only from other appeals but also from our ordinary preoccupations. In his prescient article, Engineering Consent, Edward Bernays describes the need for advertisements to ‘jut out’ from the routine: A good criterion as to whether something is or is not news is whether the event juts out of the pattern of routine. The developing of events and circumstances that are not routine is one of the basic functions of the engineer of consent. Events so planned can be projected over the communication systems to infinitely more people than those actually participating, and such events vividly dramatize ideas for those who do not witness the events. (Bernays 1947: 119) While almost anything may be used to make something ‘jut out of the pattern of routine’, the most effective means is to present information in a way that makes people feel good about themselves and the product. The tools available to marketers for this are almost limitless: goods are packaged in attractive containers and fonts are developed that convey sentiments such as being cool, clean, or edgy. Displays, atmospherics, scents, layouts, lighting, and music are visually merchandised to draw people into shops and move them along aisles in a planned way. Thanks to social media, marketers can even gauge the effectiveness of their advertisements by the way people share their responses or even the advertisements themselves. Think of the shelf life of the more effective Super Bowl commercials



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thanks to people talking about them afterwards or posting them on their Facebook pages (indeed, anticipating, watching, and sharing the commercials has become an annual event). The importance of delight to mass marketing can be seen most clearly in the use of mass entertainment. One of the main purposes of mass entertainment is to attract an audience for marketers. A great deal of leisured entertainment is now a vehicle for mass marketers on whose funding they depend. This can be seen most clearly with popular music, films, and television series which rise and fall on their capacity to generate money by attracting advertisers. So effective is entertainment in attracting clientele that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish it from other forms of communication. Oliver O’Donovan points out, for example, the ‘seepage’ between news, advertising, and entertainment: The media of publicity embrace at least three different undertakings: news, advertising, and entertainment. The official theory is that these three are quite distinct. The news does a positive social good, producing an ‘informed public’; advertising pays for the provision of news; and entertainment wins an audience for it. In reality the three enterprises are more homogeneous and more closely interwoven than the official doctrine allows. (O’Donovan 2002: 61–2) In fact, entertainment has become such a dominant vehicle for information that people assume and expect it in almost every form of ‘chosen’ activity: be it education, social engagement, or church. And the capacity for advertising to personalize entertainment is developing quickly as various Internet companies become better at gathering and analysing personal data (Turow 2011). If the first purpose of delight in marketing is to gain and hold our attention, the second is disposing the audience towards making purchases. If people feel good about themselves, they’ll want to do what the marketers suggest. This might be something as clumsy as the message ‘This is what cool kids do’ found in children’s commercials or as subtle and seemingly straightforward as developing goodwill through corporate altruism. Thus, for example, the Livestrong Foundation, Nike, and Lance Armstrong teamed up to produce ‘Livestrong’ bracelets which became a fashion success and improved the brand reputation for all involved. Marketers want to convey the

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message that they’re on our side and can help us express our true selves. And because they’ve studied us so thoroughly, very often they can back up these messages with evidence: they often do know us better than even we know ourselves. The final task of delight is encouraging brand loyalty through ‘customer satisfaction’. Marketers conduct extensive research to determine how best to meet or even exceed the expectations and perceived needs of their target group. This process is tellingly often referred to as developing ‘customer delight’. A 2011 article in Forbes magazine entitled, ‘Is Delighting the Customer Profitable?’, can be taken as a typical, if keen, illustration of this approach (Denning April 1, 2011). First, the author promotes the profitability of delighting customers: Delighting the customer is hugely profitable… . That’s ultimately why it has become a business imperative. It explains why its conquest of the business world is inevitable. It’s not because the customers are more contented or because the people doing the work are happier or because it extends the life expectancy of a firm, generates jobs and fuels the growth of the economy. It does all those things, but the real driver of its inevitability is that it makes more money. Next, the author identifies the reasons for the profitability of delight. First, it makes customers ‘have to have’ the product and consequently eager to pay extra for it (he uses Apple as an example). Second, costs are driven down because firms that prioritize delighting customers tend to work faster. Moreover, the cost of advertising is reduced by customers themselves becoming unpaid promoters: ‘The firm that has delighted customers also has the advantage of an unpaid marketing department. Its customers are delighted to sing its praises to friends and colleagues: the firm has only to sit back and watch.’ Delight therefore makes sales pitches more alluring, disposes people towards making purchases, and heightens the enjoyment of the experience of being a consumer. Little of this would be problematic if it weren’t for the massive scale of marketing and advertising in consumer societies. But what happens within the market of competing stories and delights is that the sources of delight are systematically commodified. For delight to work for marketers, people have to be pleased to do what the marketers



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desire. People shop and spend their money because they want to. People go to Starbucks rather than less-expensive local cafés because they believe the coffee tastes better. Indeed, studies show that people remain loyal to major brands because those brands activate the same part of the brain as religious devotion (Lindström 2009: 88–127). People shop in malls, regularly visit commercial websites like Amazon, spend money at major sporting events, go to movies, join expensive fitness centres, upgrade their phones and gadgets, and so on because these are the things in which they’ve been persuaded to delight from a very early age. For most people living in Western society, the good life consists primarily of having the leisure time and disposable income to delight in the consumption of commodities. Just think how few leisure activities nowadays require little or no outlay of money. This strategy for engaging people with products and services through pleasure is called by many marketing companies ‘inform, delight, and engage’ and has become a key part of Inbound marketing, a technique for attracting customers through content marketing, social media, and branding. While Steve Jobs and Apple arguably paved the way by devising strategies for connecting emotionally with people in order to foster ‘brand loyalty’ from ‘cradle to grave’, the emergence of social media and search engines has provided marketers with effective tools to convert customers through delight into willing (though unwitting) marketers. Delight is the key for getting them to share their experience with others. Such marketing has now become ubiquitous – people form relationships with corporations to an extent hitherto unknown. While much of this is due to the improved quality of many products (people wouldn’t be fiercely loyal to Apple if their electronics were rubbish), corporations also have sought to inform, engage, and delight in such a way that people develop bonds of affection for brands through the enjoyment of their products. We believe that this corporation and these products will please and satisfy us in ways that others can’t. And once we’ve become convinced of this, our brains adapt to reflect that reality. Our favourite products from our favourite brands really do please us in ways that others don’t just as the taste of Coke really did please those who empirically preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test. The mind goes where the heart leads.

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The goal of marketing is therefore to persuade us to consent to their suggestions. The whole experience of shopping, filled as it is with moments of delight, propels us to that moment of decision with a sense of expectation and freedom. We want to make the purchase: not to consent to a persuasive sales pitch is almost unthinkable since it’s what our hearts desire. Satisfaction of that desire gives us a sense of freedom because we’re doing as we please. We even feel a kind of pain if we can’t make an intended purchase and therefore go out of our way to ensure quick satisfaction. In the process, the line between needs and wants elides because we don’t stop long enough to reflect about why we wish to consent. The promise of delight has disposed us towards the goal of purchasing – failure to achieve that end represents a curtailment of our freedom because we’ve been prevented from making the choice we were persuaded to make. One of the reasons why we devour stories about the rich and famous is that unlike us they have the necessary means for realizing limitless choice – their lives represent the apotheosis of consumer identities. It would be a mistake to over-emphasize the impact of any one example of being informed and delighted towards consenting to a purchase. Most of our transactions are small, fleeting in their engagement, and soon forgotten. Most of our purchases don’t produce any noticeable sense of freedom and only rarely do we stop to celebrate our freedom and capacity to choose. But once more we are confronted by the sheer volume of marketing and purchases. The lives of most consumers are filled with purchases. A great deal of our lives is taken up by navigating persuasive appeals to our emotions and consenting to their proposals. In short, we respond daily to marketing by shopping. Every time we check in on social media, look at our emails, visit most websites, watch television, or go into town we come within range of the rhetoric of marketers. We pass our time shopping online, reading reviews, even just entertaining the fantasy of purchasing things we know we’ll never afford. The countless times we repeat the experience of consenting to purchase being informed, engaged, and delighted by marketers creates a habit. The more we shop, the more we want to shop, the more we need to shop. It’s now difficult for us to embark on any activity without buying something first. As a result, most people in advanced economies have no choice but to be consumers,



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people who habitually make meaning through the consumption of commodities. We’ve become too bound to our consumer identities and have absorbed them too deeply into how we conceive ourselves and relate to others for us to escape. Certainly, many people have regular moments of distress and seek to amend their lives. They turn to religion, embrace simplicity, practice mindfulness, or spend more time in nature – but almost always these alternatives are either undermined by the market’s rhetoric or are themselves commodified. No matter where we turn we always find ourselves standing amid an ever-expanding and ever-developing global market. But because this is a bondage of delight, we don’t really find it oppressive. In fact, we enjoy it. If given a choice between being middle-class consumers and any other identity, almost everyone in their right mind would choose the former. Who doesn’t want to enjoy the freedom of shopping or the possibility of being whoever they want to be and pursuing whatever happiness they prefer? And even if we’re being manipulated by marketers in order to make a profit, who cares? So long as we feel free, does it really matter if we aren’t. And thus, the primary identities we encounter in our societies are profitable ones that depend on the market – these are the identities we desire rather than traditional or outdated ones. And yet, even in our thorough-going consumer culture, we’re haunted by the true cost of all this. We don’t live in a world of limitless resources and we don’t seem to be able to pursue our consumer identities in a way that builds communities. There’s also a growing concern about the more obvious negative impacts of mass marketing. Parents worry about their children’s addiction to smartphones and gaming consoles. Advocacy groups and charities campaign against the sexualization of girls and young women or the impact of violent movies and games on boys and young men. Slavery and sex trafficking are reminders that consumer society can commodify anything. Despite all these concerns, there really doesn’t seem to be any alternative. Where may one go to escape from being primarily a consumer within the rhetorical community of consumerism? In this light, Grayling’s myth about the heroic choice appears inadequate or misleading. Yes, every individual has a choice: but that choice is one that has been heavily influenced by marketers and is invariably directed towards something that will make someone else a profit. We can only enjoy our freedom of choice by first surrendering

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the choice not to be a consumer. Thus, we’re bound to only those identities of which the market approves; and the mark of their approval is the dollar sign. This constant influence by the market on personal identities creates an acute dilemma for Christians who are meant to be ‘conformed to the image of the Son’ (Rom. 8.29). How is this possible given the expertise, resources, and access the market has for persuading Christians to conform to its identities? The answer given by many conservative Christians is choice: faithful Christians should choose to be faithful rather than surrender to our consumer culture. But as we’ve seen, making that choice is incredibly difficult within the rhetorical community of the market. Since the market is devising strategies for weighting our choices before we even think to make them, simply restating the obligation of Christians to live differently has now real effect. The contest isn’t between choices but between the suggestions and delights that give rise to choices. In short, if Cicero and Augustine are right, then what’s really needed isn’t just a different choice but, more fundamentally, a rival rhetoric powerful enough to persuade people to be something else than a consumer. As we’ll now see, Augustine envisioned just such a rhetoric that’s spoken into the world by an eloquent God.

PART TWO

Heavenly rhetoric

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4 Augustine’s eloquent God

For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… . For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom. 7.14-17, 19) Paul is describing his own moral struggle with sin. The Jewish Law has taught him how to distinguish right from wrong: ‘If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin’ (Rom. 7.1). So, he can’t blame ignorance for his moral failings. He knows what it means to be righteous and yet he can’t stop choosing to do what’s unrighteous. And that raises the question of why knowledge and action can be utterly divorced from each other. Paul seems to be addressing the disconnect between right knowledge and right action and he expresses this disconnect in terms of desire. He wants to do what’s right yet continues to do what’s wrong. His desires remain beyond his control, unconstrained by his actual moral knowledge; his actions follow the lead more of his heart than of his mind. Paul’s self-examination reveals the familiar gulf between moral knowledge and moral action, that being reasonable is no guard against moral weakness, and that even the wise can play the fool. Romans 7 appealed to Augustine powerfully. He returned to it regularly in his writings, applying to it the insights he had gained from rhetoric. Paul’s theology allowed him to answer the dilemma of ‘being righteous and yet a sinner’ (Luther’s simul justus et peccator) by interpreting it as a rhetorical dispute that manifests itself as an inner moral conflict – the same kind of conflict we encountered in his account of his own conversion in the Confessions. But it also gave

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him a way of explaining theologically how sinners escape bondage to sin and achieve salvation. His answer is delight: the heart must delight in righteousness before it can choose it. However, this isn’t just any delight. It’s a divine delight that originates in God, is woven into creation, and enters the human heart through the reception of the Holy Spirit. That divine or spiritual delight functions within his theology like eloquence in Cicero’s rhetoric. To be saved is to be drawn to God not by tyrannical force but by the persuasive force of God’s eloquence: the Holy Spirit. Augustine famously claimed, ‘Love God and do as you want’ (HEJ 7.8). For Augustine, to be free we must be swept up into God’s love, experienced as a ‘victorious’ delight that frees our wills not only to know righteousness but to desire it as well.

Augustine’s solution To see how he came to this rhetorical understanding of salvation, we must begin with a problem that had vexed philosophers for centuries: how can the souls trapped in bodies ascend into the heavens? While various answers were suggested (most famously by Plato), almost all agreed that it was foolish to believe that a physical body could ever ascend into the spiritual realm. Souls somehow had to escape the prison of their material bodies to enjoy a happy afterlife. Where they disagreed was on how best to achieve this worldly escape. Part of this debate revolved around knowledge and understanding. If the divine exists beyond our five senses – sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell – how can we even know there is a divine never mind try to reach it? In fact, they believed that our minds are so reliant on the five senses for information that transcendent knowledge is almost impossible to obtain, like trying to recall the ethereal strains of Bach’s Cantata, BWV 147 during a Death Metal concert. Much of Greek philosophy was devoted to arguing how the mind could be properly attuned to transcendent knowledge, which they called wisdom, so that it could encounter the divine. According to the philosopher Plotinus and the so-called Neoplatonists, the answer to that question was a contemplative ascent facilitated by philosophical study and moral self-discipline.



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Because they believed that the human soul originated in the divine, they presented this ascent as a ‘return’ (reditus) to the place where souls originated. Divine wisdom was, therefore, a kind of recovered memory of the divine. Wisdom wasn’t so much the discovery of something new as a memory of something lost – the experience of our souls before they had become trapped in bodies. A contemplative ascent, however, was beyond the capacity of most people because the pursuit of wisdom required leisure and philosophical learning. If you don’t first learn Bach’s Cantata thoroughly and find the means of escaping the distraction of the Death Metal concert, you won’t be able to hear his ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. You can see something of this mindset in one of Augustine’s early letters: ‘I cannot taste and love the pure good unless I enjoy a certain carefree repose. Believe me, there is a need of a great withdrawal from the tumult of perishing things in order to produce in a human being a freedom from fear that is not due to insensitivity, boldness, the desire for vainglory, or superstitious credulity’ (L 10.2). The unarticulated implication of this notion is that philosophical salvation lay beyond anyone unable to enjoy leisure or learning – that is, the vast bulk of humanity. Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine had been strongly attracted to Neoplatonic philosophy. He had spent his precocious youth searching for the divine, spending many years among the dualistic Manichaean sect before being introduced to some ‘books of the Platonists’, which had taught him to seek God within the ‘innermost citadel’ of his soul (CF 7.9.13–16). But no sooner had he experienced a contemplative ascent to the divine than he was weighed down by his own pride. ‘I prattled on as if I were an expert… . I began to want to give myself airs as a wise person… . Worse still, I was puffed up with knowledge’ (CF 7.18.24). This experience presented him with a catch-22: philosophy provided the wisdom needed to elevate the mind to God but also produced a moral disposition that weighed it back down to earth. How could someone seeking God gain divine wisdom without being weighed down by pride? The Incarnation resolved this problem for Augustine. Unlike the Neoplatonists who believed that the divine was basically ignorant of everything that exists beneath it, Christianity taught that God

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so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to save humankind. Augustine writes, Your Word, eternal truth, higher than the superior parts of your creation, raises those submissive to him to himself. In the inferior parts he built himself a humble house of our clay. By this he detaches from themselves those who are willing to be made his subjects and carries them across to himself, healing their swelling and nourishing their love. They are no longer to place confidence in themselves, but rather are to become weak. They see at their feet divinity become weak by his sharing in our ‘coats of skin.’ In their weakness they fall prostrate before this divine weakness which raises and lifts them up. (CF 7.18.24) God doesn’t require people to ascend to him because in his humble love he came down to them in order to raise them up. Human weakness is no longer the barrier to salvation but the means for it. Christians gain wisdom through the humility of Christ – indeed, Christ the Word is the Wisdom of God. In classical terms, however, this creedal statement didn’t really explain how one can be prepared to receive the wisdom of God. It was one thing to state that the Incarnation enables sinners to achieve salvation but another thing altogether to explain the dynamics of that salvation within the intellectual world of late antiquity. How is it that Christ enables people to receive wisdom? In a sense, that challenge was for Augustine like that faced by Christians today who try to explain creation in light of evolution. We can see the problem he faced, for example, in his account of a contemplative ascent he experienced with his mother in the Roman port of Ostia: Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon, and stars shed their light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to attain the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food. (CF 9.10.24)



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Except for the mention of Israel, this could have been written by any good Neoplatonist. It involves an escape from the senses, a withdrawal into oneself, an ascent into the heavens, and the leisure time to achieve that ascent. But there’s a striking difference: Augustine is accompanied in this ascent by his mother who had never studied philosophy – she wasn’t even particularly educated. John Peter Kenney notes that Monica represents an affront to the Platonic contemplative ideal. However unpromising she may be as a philosopher, she achieves certain knowledge of transcendental Wisdom, consummating contact with being itself within her soul… . Her success is not a function of her intellectual preparation, nor given her own story of gradual moral development, nor is it a result of some special sort of ethical insight. It is instead the function of the Spirit within her. (Kenney 2005: 112) That Monica could successfully achieve the goal of philosophical study without having studied philosophy undermined the whole substructure of Neoplatonic assumptions. How could her ascent be possible? Augustine found the answer to this problem in rhetoric. In On Order, a book he wrote at the same time as his mystical experience with his mother, he writes: In truth, however, most people are fools, so that they are led to what is right, useful, and good by their senses rather than by unadulterated truth, which very few selected souls see. It was therefore necessary that such people should be taught not so much with regard to their capacity, but often and above all by arousing their passions. Reason called this art rhetoric, assigning to it the necessary but by no means simple task of scattering charms and delight among the crowd with the intent of turning it towards what is good for it. (OO 13.38) Rhetoricians can use eloquence to enable people too ignorant to study philosophy to find God. Rhetoric can be the means whereby uneducated people can discover divine wisdom. This idea isn’t a million miles away from Cicero’s model of an orator whose eloquence imparts wisdom to the ignorant masses for their common

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benefit. If an orator can ‘through speech … have hold of people’s minds, to win over their inclinations, to drive them at will in one direction, to draw them at will from another’ why not use that power in service to divine wisdom? This may, in fact, have been a fashionable way of conceiving eloquence in Augustine’s own day. A generation before Augustine, Marius Victorinus, a North African rhetor whose works and life influenced Augustine, wrote a commentary on Cicero’s On Invention in which he gave a Neoplatonic interpretation of Cicero’s myth (Copeland and Sluiter 2009: 104–6). In his version, original humanity is savage and ignorant because it has lost all memory of its divine origin by being trapped in debased bodies like fine wine soured by being decanted into cheap containers (CCR 1.2.54–7). But Cicero’s great orator retains that memory and has the eloquence to ‘draw people through teaching from living as beasts to a knowledge of the divine’ (CCR 1.2.85–93). Only when wisdom and eloquence are joined can people be led back to their divine origins and escape the world of the senses to return to the divine (for a fuller treatment of Victorinus, see Clavier (2014): 44–50). Victorinus is an example of what Paul Kolbet calls a philosophical rhetor or a kind of philosophical therapist who sought to convince people to pursue the good life rooted in wisdom rather than in wealth, power, and pleasure (Kolbet 2010). They presented themselves as the wise and mature who could lead the ‘less mature to perceive and internalize wisdom for themselves’ (Kolbet 2010: 8). What we see here is a retooling of Cicero’s civic rhetoric for the needs of people searching for a kind of salvation. Wise and eloquent rhetoric enables the ignorant to receive divine wisdom and have their wills turned towards God. Sweet eloquence gives voice to mute wisdom to make souls divine. At first glance, therefore, Augustine seems to be advocating little beyond what Victorinus argues in his Neoplatonic commentary. Presumably, many Neoplatonic philosophers wouldn’t have disagreed with his description of rhetoric. But what happens if Cicero’s great orator is nowhere to be found because everyone is either too ignorant or morally weak to discover God? If philosophy inevitably produces worldly pride, then even a leisured philosopher is dependent on someone ‘scattering charms and delight among the crowd with the intent of turning it towards what is good for it’. Augustine’s theology compelled him to that conclusion; as we saw



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in Chapter 2, he believed everyone is already enslaved to this world and the devil. No one has escaped the eloquence of Satan. Left to their own devices, all of humanity remains utterly in bondage, living little better than scattered beasts even if they devote themselves to philosophy. In short, Augustine faced a quandary produced by his accepting Cicero’s myth while at the same believing that no great wise man of eloquence could ever arise. If no one can be like Cicero’s great orator, then what’s to be done? Is humanity forever lost? Rather than settle for that dire conclusion, Augustine turned to the only one left who might employ eloquence to make people receptive to divine wisdom: God. God himself is Cicero’s great orator who uses both eloquence and wisdom to turn people towards himself. God is the Eloquent Wisdom who draws the faithful away from diabolical charms and destructive habits towards himself. As we will now see, key to his making this bold claim was his identification of that divine eloquence with delight and of true delight with the Holy Spirit. In short, the Holy Spirit becomes God’s eloquence.

True delight To begin to see why Augustine could identify true delight with the Holy Spirit, we must first return to the idea of delight itself. It’s probably fair to say that most people today consider delight, like beauty, to be in the eye of the beholder – it’s simply a subjective response to the experience of specific pleasurable phenomena. One person might delight in gardening while another delights in computer games. One isn’t inherently any more delightful than the other. Delight is a matter of taste. Indeed, one can even delight in things that others find offensive. For Augustine, however, delight’s source is God himself. He expressed this idea in several ways. First, he could be direct as when he addresses God: ‘You alone are delight’, using in this case a Latin word (iucunditas) that carries connotations of playfulness (EP 83.6). Delight could also be an attribute of God as when he speaks of the faithful ‘contemplating the Lord’s own delight’ in heaven (e.g. HGJ 3.20; CF 12.11.12; L 130.14.27; EP 26(2).6). Finally, delight could be a quality that arises from the shared love of the Trinity: ‘That inexpressible embrace, so to say, of the Father and the image

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is not without enjoyment, without charity, without happiness. So this love, delight, felicity, or blessedness (if any human word can be found that is good enough to express it) … is the Holy Spirit’ (T 6.11). And a little later he calls the Holy Spirit ‘wholly blissful delight’ (T 6.12). What all these instances have in common is that delight for Augustine is objective because it exists eternally in God – is God. He believed that when we encounter spiritual delight, we experience God’s own love, in effect share in his own delight. Thus, whenever he speaks of spiritual delight, he means something other than an emotion manufactured by the human psyche; it’s the experience and confirmation of God’s own eternal love. Augustine states strikingly that there can be no delight without love (S 159.3). Consequently, if God is love, he must also be delight. To receive God’s love is to receive his delight. It’s important at this point to stress that true or spiritual delight isn’t just an otherworldly delight. Augustine didn’t hold to a kind of dualism that conceives of God as delightful and everything else, especially material things, as evil or ugly. Rather, he believed that divine delight is woven into the very fabric of creation. He roots all created delights within the Trinity and especially identifies them with the Holy Spirit that pervades ‘all creatures according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness that they might keep their right order and rest in their right place’ (T 6.11). Every created thing springs from the same delight or sweetness that is shared eternally by the Father and the Son and that delight manifests itself within creation in the orderliness of the cosmos. He then reiterates this point: All things around us that the divine art has made reveal in themselves a certain unity and form and order… . So then, as we direct our gaze at the creator by understanding the things that are made, we should understand this as a triad, whose traces appear in creation in a way that is fitting. In that supreme triad is the source of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and whole blissful delight. (T 6.12) Creation is therefore inherently and objectively delightful because it’s filled with God’s own delight. He even speaks of God delighting



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in his own creation: ‘God saw that it was good; it was out of the same kind-heartedness, after all, that he was pleased with what he had made, as that it had pleased him that it should be made’ (GRM 1.813). For Augustine, creation is delightful to God before it’s delightful to humankind. All of this allows Augustine to make a fairly simple equation: to exist is to be good and to be good is to be delightful. We see this, for example, in one of his sermons on the Psalms: ‘But there is a simple good, sheer Goodness-Itself, in virtue of which all things are good, the Good itself from which all good things derive their goodness. This is the delight of the Lord’ (EP 26 (2).9). What he means by this is that only God is goodness itself. Everything that exists has been created by that goodness, in fact, is only good insofar as it participates in God’s own goodness. But then he equates this goodness with delight itself, suggesting that everything that derives from God’s own goodness also derives from his own delight. Thus, to exist is to be good and to be good is to be delightful. This intimate connection between delight and existence in Augustine is crucial for understanding what’s at stake in the rhetorical contest between God and the devil. As we saw in Chapter 2, worldly or illicit delights form an almost unbreakable bond between sinners and their own destruction. The more people delight in sins, the further they move away from God towards their own perdition. But the same dynamic is at play with spiritual delight – the more people delight in God, the closer they draw to him. Augustine goes so far as to suggest that the closer the faithful draw to God the more delightful they become and the more they truly exist. He writes almost poetically: ‘Delight is like the weight of the soul. And so delight sets the soul in its place. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”, where your delight is, there your treasure will be, but where your heart is, there your beatitude or misery will be’ (OM 6.29). This idea that delight is inextricably connected to movement either towards or away from God is crucial because it suggests that the rhetorical contest between God and the devil produces an action: to move people closer to heaven or hell. But it also means that until that end is reached, souls are restless while delights pull them in opposite directions. That’s why he can say at the start of the Confessions,

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‘You arouse us to delight in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until is rests in you’ (CF 1.1.1: my own translation). True delight communicates God, calling the delighted subject towards Him. But this delight is precisely the same delight that goes right to the core of our own existence – to respond to that delight is therefore to be true to oneself, to derive pleasure from, commune with, and be sustained by our Creator. In theory, all delights that aren’t rooted in sin have the potential to draw us towards God. In one of the most often cited passages in the Confessions, each level of creation points Augustine towards God: And what is the object of my love? I asked the earth and it said, ‘It is not I.’ I asked all that is in it; they made the same confession. I asked the sea, the deeps, the living creatures that creep and they responded: ‘We are not your God, look beyond us.’ I asked the breezes that blow and the entire air with its inhabitants said: ‘Anaximenes was mistaken; I am not God.’ I asked heaven, sun, moon, and stars; they said: ‘Nor are we the God whom you seek.’ And I said to all these things in my external environment: ‘Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.’ And with a great voice they cried out: ‘He made us.’ My question was the attention I have to them, and their response was their beauty. (CF 10.6.9) All of creation points the admirer towards the God who is ‘beauty so ancient so new’ (CF 10.27.38). What Augustine’s theology of delight does is create a contest between godly or spiritual delights and worldly or illicit ones. We’ve already seen that Augustine believed that all of humanity has been conquered by sinful delights – fallen humanity delights in whatever the devil wills and, ultimately, in its own ruin. In other words, the bondage of sin disposes people against spiritual delights, making them unattractive or imperceptible. That bondage also makes it impossible for people to free themselves to respond to true delight. We’re like an audience completely enamoured with an eloquent demagogue. What’s needed is a great orator, someone more eloquent than the devil, someone who can overwhelm sinful delights with true delight. That orator is God and the Holy Spirit his eloquence.



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Love outpoured Augustine’s association of the Holy Spirit with true delight is rooted in his theological conception of the Holy Spirit as communion, divine love, and as God’s gift. These images interplay with each other in his theology, each enriching his understanding of the other. The Holy Spirit is communion because he’s the shared love of the Father and the Son that arises from their giving themselves entirely to each other. He’s divine love because true self-giving communion is just another name for love. And he’s God’s gift because he’s the gift of loving communion shared between the Father and the Son, and through them both with the faithful. Augustine captures the full complexity of the three images in one of his sermons: The property of the Holy Spirit is to be the communion of the Father and Son. So by what is common to them [love] both the Father and Son wished us to have communion both with them and among ourselves; by this gift which they both possess as one they wished to gather us together and make us one, that is to say, by the Holy Spirit who is God and gift of God. By this gift we are reconciled to the godhead, and are delighted by love, and it enables us both to know things more thoroughly and to enjoy them when known more happily. (S 71.18) By pouring love into the hearts of the faithful, the Holy Spirit acts as the channel for the indwelling of the Trinity in their hearts. This love is what draws the faithful to God. Behind this passage lies one of Augustine’s favourite biblical verses: ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’ (Rom. 5.5). While that verse appears more than two hundred times in his writings, three examples will suffice to demonstrate how he used it (see La Bonnardière 1954: 657 for a list of instances). In his On the Morals of the Catholic Church, Augustine argues that happiness consists of living a righteous life based on a total love of virtue, wisdom, and truth. Since that love is beyond human capacity, the Holy Spirit comes down as love to sanctify the faithful. He concludes, Inspired by the Holy Spirit, this love leads us to the Son, that is, to the wisdom of God through whom the Father himself is

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known. If wisdom or truth is not desired with all the powers of the soul, it shall not be found at all, but if it is sought after as it deserves to be, it cannot withhold itself nor hide from those who love it… . It is love that asks, love that seeks, love that knocks, love that discloses, and love, too, that abides in that which has been disclosed. (M 1.17.32) In other words, sinners must be filled with God’s love through the gift of the Holy Spirit in order to seek, find, obtain, and abide in God’s wisdom. Christ is the wisdom of God and the Holy Spirit is his eloquence. At about the same time, Augustine wrote a letter that includes a similar understanding of the Holy Spirit: ‘there flows through the Son both a knowledge of the Father, that is, of the one principle from whom all things come, and a certain interior and ineffable tenderness and sweetness of remaining in this knowledge and scorning all mortal, which gift and function is properly attributed to the Holy Spirit’ (L 11.4). Wisdom and sweetness, like wisdom and eloquence in Victorinus’ commentary, are united in the Son and the Holy Spirit so that the faithful may attain to and remain in the knowledge of the Father. Finally, in his early work On Faith and the Creed, Augustine opens his discussion of the Holy Spirit by first quoting Rom. 5.5 before explaining that this outpouring of the Holy Spirit is called a gift: ‘Because no one enjoys what he knows unless he loves it. To enjoy the Wisdom of God is nothing else but to cleave to him in love; and no one has an abiding grasp of anything unless he loves it’ (FC 9.19). Wisdom along with love or enjoyment are again united; it’s not enough for someone to encounter the wisdom of God alone. Receiving and abiding in that wisdom are beyond the capacity of people unless they’re also filled with the transcendent love of God. In Christ, we encounter divine wisdom and through the Holy Spirit we receive transcendent love – in both instances, wisdom and enjoyment find their source in God rather than our own hearts. As Carol Harrison notes, ‘If understanding and reason are associated with the Son … then love and delight are associated with the Holy Spirit. Reason and delight are as inseparable … as the union of the persons of the Trinity; we cannot have one without the other’ (Harrison 2006: 273). These works present the logical conclusion of Augustine identification of love with delight. First, he identifies the Holy



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Spirit with the love shared eternally between the Father and the Son. Since there can be no love without delight, the Holy Spirit must therefore also be the eternal delight of God: ‘He is wholly blissful delight’, the ‘sweetness’ of the eternally shared love of the Father and the Son. To have our hearts filled with God’s love is to have them also filled with his delight. And because that love and delight arise from the communion of the Trinity, the effects of receiving the Holy Spirit are both reconciliation and unity. In the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, love, delight, communion, and unity become intertwined with each other as characteristic of those who can now abide in divine wisdom. In that sense, the Spirit does no more than eloquence in Cicero’s myth: it unites individuals into a unified people, makes them receptive to wisdom, and achieves both through delight. But the reception of wisdom through delight is paramount to Augustine’s theology. In his letter to Simplicianus, Augustine argues that we can’t receive the teaching or testimony of God unless it’s aided by delight (TS 1.2.21). Unless we delight in truth, truth won’t take hold of us. But it’s beyond us to guarantee such delight – we don’t have enough control over delight to ensure that we’ll enjoy truth even if we encounter it. And so, the Holy Spirit is poured into our hearts, providing us with the ‘motive-power’ to receive God’s truth by ‘stirring’ our minds to receive it (TS 1.2.21). By giving us the Holy Spirit, God’s delight persuades us to accept his saving truth; the Spirit’s eloquence causes us to be pleased by and delight in Christ, the Wisdom of God. Augustine, however, is a sufficiently experienced orator to know that this isn’t a straightforward process. It’s not just a matter of the Holy Spirit entering our hearts and the job’s done. Rather, the reception of God’s delight begins the process of freeing us from the eloquence of sinful delights. That freedom, however, is no more instantaneous and without anguish than Augustine’s own conversion had been nor does it set the soul at rest before we reach heaven. We are righteous and yet sinners. Instead, the reception of the Holy Spirit results in a divided will, a moral conscience at war with self-pride that leaves even the holiest saints feeling like St Paul in Romans 7. In fact, the reception of the Holy Spirit makes the faithful like an audience caught between two masterfully eloquent orators, pulled miserably in two opposite directions. It’s precisely at this point in Augustine’s theology that his interpretation of Romans 7 is crucial.

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Romans 7 Towards the end of his career, Augustine preached several homilies in which he used Romans 7 to explore theologically the restlessness caused by competing delights. Before we look at a couple of those sermons more closely, it’s useful first to summarize how Augustine presented this restlessness as a movement away from bondage to sin to God’s eternal freedom (for a full discussion, see Van Fleteren 2001: 91–6). He presented the process of full conversion as consisting of four stages based on Paul’s dichotomy of law and grace. Prior to the Law when a person is full of sinful desires and consents to them Under the Law when a person is full of sinful desires, recognizes them for what they are, but lacks the strength to resist them Under Grace when a person is full of sinful desires but can resist them through grace In Peace when there is no sinful desires and a person is therefore at peace The journey from a person ‘prior to the Law’ to one who is ‘in peace’ reflects the Patristic understanding of the history of human redemption. According to that understanding, humankind after the Fall begins in ignorance of sin and without any power to do good – humankind is completely in bondage to sin and death lacking the capacity for both moral knowledge and moral action. Augustine refers to this stage as the ‘animal, carnal state’, which is reminiscent of Cicero’s portrayal of original humanity (83Q 66.3). Next, the Law of Moses was given by God to teach how to live justly according to God’s will. Now there is the possibility of right knowledge but there’s still no power for people to turn that knowledge into right action: ‘overcome by sin’s habits, we sin because faith does not yet assist us’ (83Q 66.3). Only with Christ is the grace given for people to living righteously, and we ‘no longer are overcome by the delight of an evil habit when it strives to draw us into sin’ (83Q 66.3). This is the present condition of the faithful: they have right knowledge and are capable in Christ of right action but are often undermined by irrepressible desires. Only after Judgement Day will



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the faithful be entirely freed from sinful desires so that they can live in perfection. Augustine mapped this process onto individual lives. Thus, people before they begin to convert are like humanity before the Law, entirely enslaved to sin through ignorance and sinful desire. Then they encounter Christ, the wisdom of God, and discover what it means to live righteously. At this point, each person is like Augustine after he had rationally accepted Catholic teaching but before his heart had been converted. Only after people have received the Holy Spirit can they truly embrace that wisdom and no longer consent to sins. But the old desires and delights continue to appeal so that life becomes a moral struggle between the spirit and the flesh. Only when grace and spiritual delight have entirely conquered the individual’s will – what Augustine calls ‘victorious delight’ – do the faithful finally find rest. Augustine writes, ‘Therefore, in the first [stage of] activity, which is prior to the Law, there is no struggle with the pleasures of the world; in the second, which is under the Law, we struggle but are overcome; in the third, we struggle and overcome; in the fourth, we don’t struggle, but rest in perfect and eternal peace’ (83Q 66.6). The movement from bondage to freedom isn’t motivated by a rational apprehension of truth. In the second stage, the person has knowledge and can recognize sin but lacks the power to resist it. Something more than knowledge is needed for a person to ‘overcome’ sinful delights. Instead, what moves a person from being ‘under the law’ to being ‘under grace’ is delight. But where does that delight come from? It doesn’t come from the Law or the human heart. In his commentary on Galatians, Augustine explains that delight is infused through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit: For we necessarily act in accordance with what delights us more, as for example when the beauty of an attractive woman meets our eyes and moves us towards a delight in fornication. But, if through the grace that is in faith in Christ, that inmost loveliness – the pure beauty of chastity – delights us more, we will live and act in accordance with that, not behaving with sin reigning in us so that we obey its desires, but with righteousness reigning through love with great delight. And we know that whatever we do in love is pleasing to God. Now what I have said

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about purity and fornication I want to be understood of other things as well. (CG 49) The line that divides living ‘under the law’ from living ‘under grace’ is that one’s heart has been persuaded by delight to accept divine teaching – God delights us more than sin. A convert is taught wisdom, is gripped by the true delight of the Holy Spirit, and is persuaded to draw nearer to God. The dynamics of salvation conform to Cicero’s definition of eloquence: we are saved only after God has taught, delighted, and persuaded us to love him more than anything else. Turning now to Augustine’s sermons, we can focus on what the life of Christians within his scheme is like – that is, how it feels to be torn between the flesh and the spirit. In sermon 154, Augustine explains that even saints like Paul experience a moral contest between their conscience and temptations. Both the spirit and the flesh are armed with a quiver full of powerful delights. These opposing delights create an inward struggle that catches the faithful in a moral dilemma. Augustine explains: You see lust kicking up a rumpus outside, you issue a decree against it, to cleanse your conscience. ‘I don’t want to,’ you say, ‘I won’t do it. Granted it would be delightful. I won’t do it. I have something else to delight in. For I delight in the law of God according to the inner self. Why are you rowdily proposing foolish, transient, vain, and harmful delights, and telling me about them like a chatterer?’ (S 154.12) Two competing delights, each trying to persuade individuals to consent to their appeals, thereby leading them towards either further bondage to sin or freedom in God. So now if the mind doesn’t consent to sin tickling its fancy, making suggestions, beckoning it on; if the mind doesn’t consent, because it has other inner delights of its own in no way to be compared with the delights of the flesh; so if it doesn’t consent, and there is in me something dead and something alive, death is still striving, but the mind is alive and not consenting. (S 154.14)



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Both sides suggest competing ideas in ways that are delightful so that the individual will be persuaded to consent – to be pleased by what one side suggests more than the other. Moral struggle is a rhetorical battle. In sermon 159, Augustine goes into even greater detail about this inner struggle. He begins by describing opposing delights. Lawful delights like food and drink, sunlight, the light of the moon and stars, beautiful music, pleasant smells, and ‘lawful pleasures of the flesh’ appeal to everyone. These are all good delights that God created. He sets unlawful delights in opposition to these: theatrical shows, music halls, the scent of pagan incense, pagan banquets, and sex with prostitutes. He then concludes, ‘So you see, dearest friends, that our bodily senses provide us with delights both lawful and unlawful. But let our delight in justice be such that it beats even lawful delights’ (S 159.2). This volley of delights produces an inner struggle as each competes for our consent. The reason why we can’t simply delight in justice is because there’s a ‘tempter’ who seeks to draw the faithful away from God. Augustine illustrates what he means by getting his congregation to consider gold: to deny that gold is delightful would be ‘insulting to the Creator’. But the devil uses that delight against us. Perhaps he makes us afraid we’ll lose our wealth unless we perjure ourselves or perhaps he lures us with the promise of more gold if we do as he wills. ‘Two kinds of delight are fighting it out in you; now I ask the question, which do you prefer, which delights you the more, gold or truth?’ (S 159.5–6). The answer he wants is obvious. We must love truth more. It’s in this sermon that Augustine states, ‘We only love … what delights us’. In order to love truth fully we must delight in it more than anything else (S 159.3). But it’s no good just stating this. Being told that we ought to delight in God above all else isn’t the same as doing it. Proper delight isn’t a matter of willpower, of simply intending to do what we know we should. Really, it’s a matter of slavery to delight. In his sermon on John 8.31-36, Augustine suggests that the real question his congregation faces is to which form of slavery they’ll submit: Insofar as we are slaves to God, we are free; insofar as we are enslaved to the law of sin, we are still slaves. Hence the Apostle says … ‘I am delighted with the law of God in the inner man.’

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See wherein we are free, wherein we are delighted with the law of God? Freedom delights. For as long as you do what is just out of fear, God doesn’t delight in you. As long as you do it, still as a slave, he does not delight you: let him delight you and you are free. (HJG 41.10.3) No one can be other than a slave to delight; only by being filled with the Holy Spirit, the love of God, the delight of God, can one find freedom in slavery to God. As noted by Eugene TeSelle, Augustine interprets Romans 7 through his allegorical interpretation of the Fall that we examined in Chapter 2 (TeSelle 2001: 341–62). Suggestion, delight, and persuasion determine our salvation or damnation. But whereas the devil seeks to tempt us with ‘misdirected’ delights that end in bondage, God infuses his conquering delight, which leads the will, ‘inviting consent and making it possible’ (TeSelle 2001: 325). Elsewhere, Augustine lays out his whole rhetorical scheme at length: Besides the fact that human beings are created with free choice of the will and besides the teaching by which they are commanded how they ought to live, they receive the Holy Spirit so that there arises in their minds a delight in and a love for that highest and immutable good that is God, even now while they walk in faith, not yet by vision. By this [love] given to them like the pledge of a gratuitous gift, they are set afire with the desire to cling to the creator and burn to come to a participation in that true light, so that they have their well-being from him whom they have their being. And when what we should do, and the goal we should strive for begin to be clear, unless we delight in it and love it, we don’t act, don’t begin, don’t live good lives. But so that we may love it, the love of God is poured into our hearts, not by free choice which comes from ourselves, but by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (SL 3.5) Imagine, if you will, two orators holding forth before a massive audience. The debate opens with the devil already in total command of the audience. He has won them people over to his will through suggestions of sinful delights that have seduced them into consenting and performing what he desires, which is their own individual and



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collective destruction. They have fallen entirely under the charm of his eloquence even though his rhetoric has led them to their ruin. God takes the stage to combat this diabolical rhetoric with his own truth: His Son, the very Word through whom they’ve all been made and by whose death and resurrection they can now know God. But the habit of listening to and being pleased by the devil’s rhetoric makes them impervious to that truth. They can’t embrace Christ unless they’re persuaded to do so through an eloquence greater than the devil’s: this is the Holy Spirit who dispels the charm of diabolical eloquence by turning the audience’s attention from the devil and infusing them with a burning desire for God. But that doesn’t end the rhetorical battle. This present life is that oratorical scene, and the restless heart every person experiences is the impact of that rhetorical contest on the soul. The eloquence of the devil continues to try to sway the faithful to do his will and embrace their own destruction. Spiritual delight contends with sinful delights, disturbing the faithful, leaving them restless and indecisive. The dilemma described by Paul in Romans 7 isn’t between contending beliefs but between opposing delights that inspire opposing desires. Augustine, I think, implies that if it were just down to deciding between conflicting ideas then our experience of faith would involve far less anguish. But because our emotions and affections, even our deepest desires, are involved, the experience of restlessness runs right through us, impacting us at every level of our being. Only after God’s Eloquence is utterly victorious – after Judgement Day or in the next life (however you want to think of it) – will the audience finally be at rest, finding wholeness and freedom in God’s perfect Sabbath. Augustine’s rhetorical training and theological acumen provided him with a striking understanding not only of the dilemma faced by Christians described in Romans 7 but of how to articulate the process and experience of redemption. Augustine gives experiential depth to the Pauline theology of bondage to sin and death. By locating the key moment with delight rather than choice, he shifted the emphasis from the mind to the heart, thereby explaining why embracing virtue and shunning sin is so hard. In order to be saved, people must be inflamed with a desire to love God, and that only happens if they’re first overwhelmed by the presence of God experienced as delight, which is none other than the Holy Spirit. Thus, Augustine’s grand vision of God’s rhetorical intervention

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provides an approach for understanding how Christians today can overcome the persuasive delights of the market. God’s own delight enables people to become part of a Christian community that stands apart from consumerism and challenges it where it’s strongest: its rhetoric. By applying Augustine’s rhetorical theology to the dilemma of being a Christian within a consumer culture, we can begin to formulate an effective way for the church to engage in mission and ministry today.

5 The divided wills of Christian consumers

‘Winter is coming’ During the summer of 2016, a debate erupted over social media about whether faithful Christians should watch Game of Thrones. The argument had little to do with the violence depicted in the films or even the appalling ways many of the characters treat each other. As usual, it was about sex: given the series’ graphic and often violent sexual scenes, could Christians watch the series without committing a sin? Even the eminent conservative pastor John Piper weighed in by composing twelve questions that Christians should ask themselves before settling down with a bowl of popcorn to enjoy the antics of the denizens of Westeros (Piper 2014). I believe with all my heart that what the world needs is radically bold, sacrificially loving, God-besotted ‘freaks’ and aliens… . The world does not need more cool, hip, culturally savvy, irrelevant copies of itself. That is a hoax that has duped thousands of young Christians. They think they have to be hip, cool, savvy, culturally aware, watching everything in order not to be freakish. And that is undoing them morally and undoing their witness. So, here are … 12 reasons why I am committed to a radical abstention from anything I know is going to present me with nudity. The perspective that lies behind Piper’s twelve theses is unequivocal: the world is dominated by an inherently or largely anti-Christian

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media industry that appeals strongly to young men and women, even those who consider themselves good Christians. The response by other Christians to these and similar concerns was equally firm. Denise McAllister, a journalist for The Federalist, wrote: The fact is, Christians can watch ‘Game of Thrones’. It’s not sinful, it’s not bringing shame to their Christian testimony, and it’s not unwise. The series is filled with lessons for humanity in love, devotion, politics, family, and life. To judge them by the standard of your own fragile conscience is to proudly put yourself in the place of God. (McAllister 2017) For David Muth, writing for The Living Church, the Game of Thrones is brutal and meaningless but also ‘Christ-haunted’, which he, in the tradition of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, likens to the old pagan world: ‘Pleasures were to be grasped in whatever form they may be readily at hand, and whether they involved cruelty or kindness was a matter of relative taste’ (Muth 2013). He even finds moral worth in watching the series: ‘Seeing the hopelessness and savagery of what this age threatens to become may serve to shake us from our torpor.’ In both instances, the apologists seem to be arguing that by watching Game of Thrones, Christians can gain a perspective on reality as it is or, at least, as it’s becoming – both sordid and beautiful. Whatever the merits of these and similar arguments, in many respects, the debate about Game of Thrones is a reprisal of a concern as old as Christianity itself: what does it mean in our ordinary lives to be in the world but not of it? Where do Christians draw the line beyond which they may not stray without compromising their faith? That is, if you will, the perpetual dilemma faced by being ‘citizens of heaven’ (Phil. 3.20) in a fallen world. Be it whether one can eat meat sacrificed to idols (1 Corinthians 8), watch shows in the Roman theatre (Dox 2004), dabble in magic, dance, drink alcohol, fight in wars, or listen to Rock ‘n Roll, the concern has always been about how deeply Christians can be immersed in the world before they become indistinguishable from that world – invariably, these debates have acknowledged that the flesh can be more appealing than the spirit. One difference with current debates like about watching Game of Thrones, however, is their context. There’s now a keen awareness



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that it’s increasingly difficult for even devout Christians (Piper’s ‘freaks and aliens’) to stand apart from the world. Consumer culture has already stormed the ramparts, leaving even Christian sectarians nowhere to hide. Tacit to many of these debates is the fear that Christians, especially young ones, pay little heed to what the church says about their views or habits. They can make up their own minds and partake of whatever pleasures they desire and deem harmless. In a broadband world, the old strategies for sustaining a distinct Christian identity no longer work (if they ever did). Many Christians find ideas like Piper’s about what it means to be ‘faithful’ Christians irrelevant and even ludicrous. All the same, with the incursion of the public into the private (and vice versa), the struggle to be a ‘good Christian’ in a consumer culture can now be unremittent and tiresome. If one must consider the morality of watching Game of Thrones – the subject of debate only because of its popularity – then how many other activities and behaviours must Christians worry about daily and largely in the privacy of their own home? Now that we can satisfy almost any desire from the comfort of our own homes, very often we must decide not to do something rather than to do it. There’s no escape from temptations, as anyone who decides to limit their time on social media without throwing away their phones knows. Take, by way of illustration, the issue of pornography. Without fast Internet and fortified by the fear of mortification, it was a relatively easy for most Christians to decide not the purchase and view pornographic material. One had to go out of one’s way to obtain it. Now that such material is only a click away in the privacy of one’s home (and further concealed by ‘incognito mode’), that decision has become a constant struggle for many Christians – surveys suggest it’s also one that many lose. Pornography is, however, only one of the more egregious examples of the countless ways that consumer society can impact the individual and collective identity of Christians. Thanks to the pervasive nature of marketing, the shaping of how we understand who we are and the world to which we belong is without respite. To adopt a strong view that Christians should try to reject consumerism is to subject oneself to a relentless struggle against society and hosts of marketers armed with our personal data and trained to influence and monetize our desires. A devout, conservative Evangelical might completely agree with Piper’s argument and yet need to resist the temptation to watch

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Game of Thrones every time it’s advertised on TV and in social media or is just the topic of conversation. Thus, unless we decide to join a Christian community that’s disconnected from both technology and society, our struggle to resist the allure of consumer culture is relentless and mostly private. Without a realistic means of escaping consumer culture and faced with personal choices about consumption, we can only try to inhabit our Christian identity amid the hubbub of the marketplace. Left with no meaningful alternative, I rather than church communities or religious tenets determine what it means to be faithful. Churches long ago lost the capacity to enforce codes of conduct or beliefs. We must therefore now discover our identity within a consumer culture that’s a day-to-day reality far more than any church community. Indeed, we’re already consumers before we even embark on this process of discernment – not surprisingly, therefore, we approach religious beliefs in much the same way that we approach shopping, seeking out those beliefs and practices that appeal while rejecting those that don’t, especially if they’re unpopular or reactionary. In short, we want a faith that matches our self-image, perhaps even augments or expresses it. The growing impotence of churches to shape and nurture distinct identities for their membership coincides with the emergence of consumer culture and in recent years with the development of the Internet. In that respect, what’s happening to Christianity in the West mirrors the destabilization of identity and the fragmentation of the self that have been associated with so-called postmodernism (see Harvey 1991). The old certainties are falling away, leaving believers and non-believers alike with no option but to construct their own meaning and lifestyles – or rather, as we have seen, to be persuaded to choose among a range of lifestyles and meanings pitched to them in the marketplace. In other words, churches are by and large weaker cultures than the consumer culture in which they’re set. The primary community for Christians, as for everyone else, is consumerism: it’s the overarching rhetorical community to which we belong, and it shapes our selfidentity and notions of freedom through its manipulation of our delights. Only by first being citizens of that rhetorical community can we then join the rhetorical tribes that populate consumerism, including Christianity. From the perspective of consumer culture, being Christian, Muslim, or Hindu is no different from belonging



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to any other identity group – each produces a range of consumer behaviours for which good marketers will account in developing their strategies. Indeed, most religious movements must rely on marketers to advertise themselves and gain followers, who often differ little from fans. Just looks at all the merchandise associated with various forms of monastic life or the commercialization of ‘Christian music’. No matter how loudly churches rail against commercialization, they pose little threat to the overall power structures of consumerism. A somewhat pessimistic outlook on Christianity in the West begins to emerge. Individual Christians are confronted by the daily experience of coping with consumer culture but lack the necessary support of a church community capable of presenting meaningful, alternative ways of living. As a result, the dilemma of being distinctively Christian in a consumer society is increasingly lonely, disconnected, and hopeless; we’re constantly caught between knowing what we ought to do and wanting to do something else. We know that we should attend church more regularly or work together to serve the needs of our communities, but we want to shop, spend time on the Internet, or play sports. The thousands of decisions that arise from this dilemma then shape how Christians understand themselves and their faith, often creating a widening divide between how we view ourselves and the lifestyle we actually embrace. And because churches typically only address questions about right belief while the market targets our desires, the church’s struggle against the world is hopeless. As a result, churchgoing becomes chiefly a leisure activity like playing golf, birdwatching, or belonging to a club. Fewer and fewer see it as the lifeblood and reason for their faith. This is what has memorably been termed, ‘Believing without belonging’ – but the reason why so many feel little need to belong is that church communities provide little that can’t be found elsewhere in consumer culture.

The Christian dilemma – The concept of world views One of the more popular ways of discussing the dilemma of being a Christian in the world, and especially the late modern

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world, is in relation to world views. Originating in the German concept, Weltanshauung, or philosophy of life, world views are overarching narratives, expressed through stories, symbols, and practices, that are socially constructed and provide meaning to our experience of belonging in the world. Typically, world views are described by how they answer four questions: Where are we? Who are we? What’s wrong? What’s the remedy? So, for example, the Enlightenment world view can be described as envisioning a world of limitless promise and wealth in which people are the ‘conquistadors’ taming the wild world; the problems they must overcome are medieval hierarchies and religious superstition through freeing people from social, ecclesiastical, and economic shackles (Middleton 1995: 11–12). From the perspective of theologians who make world views central to their thinking, the dilemma faced by the church and individual Christians today can be understood as a clash between opposing world views. Christians, some argue, must learn how to hold firm to a ‘biblical’ or ‘Christian’ world view in a society inclined towards other world views. In the past, too many Christians surrendered to the Enlightenment world view (Evangelical industrialists and Christian empire-builders are two examples) and thus became disconnected from the world view found in Scripture. Today, the church finds itself in a different quandary – namely, how to present the ‘truth’ of the gospel in a ‘postmodern’ world filled with lots of competing truths, none of which is actually true because there’s now no such thing as objective reality (see, for example, Wright 2000). World views are helpful because they remind us that our perspective is always shaped by the community and age in which we belong. World views allow us to recognize that, despite the valorization of the autonomous individual, people engage with and understand their world socially – their beliefs are always rooted in the way they perceive reality. The emphasis on the overarching stories that underpin communal practices and beliefs forces us to acknowledge how our own reality arises from a need to narrate ourselves and our world socially. We’re ‘story-formed’ people (to borrow a phrase from Stanley Hauerwas) and those stories engender the virtues we most admire and the taboos we most abhor. The concept of world views pushes us to accept that our view of reality can’t be self-evident or stand apart from the stories that produce it. In other words, even if one thinks of one’s own world view as



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the truth, that truth is circumscribed by our experience of belonging within a particular social setting. Anyone who doesn’t share that experience can’t be expected to recognize that truth when he or she encounters it – our imaginations and intellect are incapable of accepting what can’t be imagined or conceived. Thus, for example, people of a secular mindset define marriage very differently from many Christians or Muslims while ideas such as chastity and piety are difficult for non-religious people to comprehend. Accordingly, one could seek to understand consumerism in terms of a world view. To do this, we might employ the four questions that define world views: 1 Where are we? We live in a world where there’s limitless possibilities to construct meaning because, like the Enlightenment, we also believe there are inexhaustible natural resources and the eternal promise of technological innovation. 2 Who are we? We are Hercules: individuals with the capacity to choose to pursue whatever happiness we desire through the consumption of goods and services. Society thrives when most people can pursue their dreams as long as these don’t harm or impose constraints on others. 3 What’s wrong? Social, cultural, institutional, and religious forces seek to impose limits on our freedom to choose and confine us to imposed identities that prevent us from discovering our own authenticity. These cause us to be miserable, repressed, and psychologically distressed. They also limit our personal creativity. 4 What’s the remedy? We must work relentlessly to bring about technological advancement, legal reforms, cultural progress, and expansion of the free market so autonomous individuals can break free from the social, cultural, and religious oppression that limits their capacity to choose whatever good life enables them to flourish. A Christian apologist or ethicist could then mount her attack on consumerism by exposing its historical and social roots and by challenging the stories and practices that inform how it answers those four questions. This would have the advantage of helping people to realize that what they consider normal is actually a particular way

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of understanding reality that emerges from a particular tradition of thought. She might then articulate a Christian world view and explain its answers to the four questions and the biblical narrative from which they arise. She could also demonstrate to Christians how their participation in consumer culture and unthinking acceptance of its world view warp the gospel message and compromise their Christian identity. All that’s then needed are Christians with enough integrity and confidence to embrace the biblical narrative, proclaim it to others, and challenge those world views that seek to undermine it. We see such an approach, for example, in the book Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview: Christian mission … requires the development of a Christian worldview. Since we live and think out of our worldviews, it is not a question of whether we have one worldview or not. The question, instead, is this: Out of which worldview will we think, live, and work? If we refuse to develop and indwell a Christian worldview, we will merely leave ourselves vulnerable to the influence of the worldviews present in the culture that surrounds us. But if we are serious about bearing witness to the Lord Christ with the integrity and depth that such witness requires in our modern day, the development and appropriation of a Christian worldview rooted in the drama of Scripture will become a priority. Our mission demands it. (Goheen 2008: 29) Implicit in this message is that all Christians need to do is choose to ‘develop and indwell a Christian worldview’ to withstand consumer culture and proclaim the gospel. Again, there’s much to commend about this way of understanding the dilemma faced by Christians in the twenty-first century. But there are also problems with thinking about the Christian dilemma simply in terms of a clash of world views. First, it tends to oversimplify how people actually conceive of their world, exemplified by the proposition that a portrayal of reality can be summed up by answers to four questions. In fact, people who share the same world view might answer those questions differently; for example, during modernity an industrialist would provide very different answers than  a farmer or a poor woman living in the East End of London. Who’s to say which answers epitomize their shared overarching narrative? This oversimplification then encourages



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people to think of world views as entirely distinct from each other. For example, the biblical world view is typically opposed to that of modernity as though the Enlightenment could have happened without Christianity or any presentation of a biblical world view isn’t influenced by the church’s experience of the past two hundred years. In reality, world views overlap and both draw from and define themselves against each other. Someone seeking to describe the biblical world view today would do so very differently from someone during the seventeenth century. In fact, world views are shorthand ways of conceptualizing incredibly complex social engagements with the world. Like most generalization, they begin to fall apart when pressed too hard. Take for example the idea of a Christian world view: Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists would describe their world views very differently as would, if we had a way of interrogating them, any Christians who predate our own period of history. Recent conflicts over human sexuality demonstrate that Christians in sub-Saharan Africa have a very different understanding of the world than many Christians living in North America or the British Isles. Similarly, the fact that our reality is shaped socially forces us to accept that our interpretation of other world views is also influenced by that social portrayal of reality. We can’t stand outside our own reality to describe objectively how others perceive that reality – an Evangelical American understands postmodernity differently than an Arab Muslim or a Vietnamese Buddhist. Finally, world views tend to be described as systems of thought: ways of conceiving of the world and life. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘a set of fundamental beliefs, values, etc., determining or constituting a comprehensive outlook on the world; a perspective on life’.1 The next two chapters will address in more detail why this doesn’t take us far enough in understanding how people make sense of their world. For the moment, the key observation is that this emphasis on the thinking-engagement with the world invariably leads to an emphasis on the intellect when explaining conversion from one world view to another. People

‘world-view, n.’. OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. http://ezproxyprd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2355/view/Entry/230262?redirectedFrom=worldview (accessed 6 November 2017). 1

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just need to tell their stories better in order to convert people to their own understanding of the world. Or if they have begun to stray from their preferred world view, then they just need to root themselves more strongly in the drama of Scripture to be more faithful to God’s reality. Like the experienced Shakespearean actors immersing themselves in the script, Christians need to indwell the biblical drama by serious, passionate study of the Scriptures. This indwelling requires us to become intimately familiar with the biblical text in order to gain a deep, intuitive sense of the story’s dramatic movement and the Author’s plot intentions. Like the Shakespearean troupe, the purpose of this indwelling would be to ground faithful improvisation. (Middleton 1995: 183) Accordingly, this self-rooting in the biblical drama allows Christians to align their lives with the ‘dramatic movement’ of the Bible and in accordance with God’s will. Again, this approach is not without merit because it at least gets us away from the old myth that individuals act as free and unconstrained moral agents, as exemplified by Grayling’s use of the story of Hercules’ choice. But many accounts of world views fail to acknowledge that stories, symbols, and practices don’t derive their social influence intellectually. We don’t inhabit a Christian world view by learning about its stories and practices rationally – that would just make us anthropologists. As James K. A. Smith argues, ‘Such construals of worldview belie an understanding of Christianity that is dualistic and thus reductionistic: It reduces Christian faith primarily to a set of ideas, principles, claims, and propositions that are known and believed. The goal of all this is “correct” thinking’ (Smith 2009: 32). It is akin to someone trying to become an American by reading books about the American ideal and watching Westerns. Instead, the power of world views lies in how they engage us affectively – they appeal to the heart more than to the brain. The fundamental stories, symbols, and practices that comprise a world view shape us emotionally and develop strong social bonds of affection between individuals and their shared stories, symbols, and practices. Thus, being immersed in a Christian world view impacts us far more powerfully than understanding that world view because



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that experience evokes and affects our loves. This means, in the words of Smith, that being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into our head in order to guarantee proper behaviour; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly – who loves God and neighbour and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practice of Christian worship – through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine. (Smith 2009: 32–3) The affective power of world views also explains why we can reject a community’s beliefs more easily than its stories and practices: even convinced atheists celebrate Christmas. Similarly, world views spread and overtake other world views less through rational argument than through experience and appeals to the heart. Evangelists of one world view – even someone as avowedly ‘rational’ as Richard Dawkins – seek to persuade others to their own perspective by making them want to belong, to be part of that tribe who view the world in a manner that captivates. Very often it’s the experience of being among people with a distinct perspective that shifts, perhaps without our even realizing it, how we view the world and ourselves. We can see this dynamic at work in regional political identities: the American South remains thoroughly Republican despite mass migration for generations from the more Democratic strongholds in the North and Midwest. Despite fears that the Northern influx threatens Southern identity, at least on the political level the evidence so far seems to suggest their widespread enculturation. The reason for this is that we’re strongly persuaded emotionally by the world view that best presents itself as normal – or to put this negatively, we find it hard to hold onto a way of conceiving reality that society finds abnormal. In the end, therefore, the world view approach on its own doesn’t resolve the dilemma of being a Christian in the contemporary world; it just articulates the boundaries between the church and the world. Christians may become experts on describing how a biblical world view differs from a consumer one and yet remain every bit as much the consumers they were before. Knowledge doesn’t in and of itself result in a real and discernible conversion. In short, world views

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inform (albeit in an over-simplified way) but provide no power for people to make use of that knowledge. Seen in this light, the concept of world views can be compared to the Law within Augustine’s scheme of redemption: it provides right knowledge but no capacity for right action because it leaves our delights and our desires unaffected. World views help people to realize that wider culture is less avowedly Christian and to consider what this actually means in terms of how they live out their faith. This knowledge has benefit even if we disagree with how the Christian world view is described; at least it’s trying to articulate a different way of engaging with the world. If people don’t understand that they may be living more as consumers-by-vocation than as Christians, then how can they be expected to behave differently? Presenting Christianity and consumerism as opposing world views therefore provides that information just as the Law provided knowledge of sin and righteousness. But the concept of world views neglects our desires and the sources of delight that inflame those desires. It does little to arm people against the persistent rhetoric of the market; neither does it address the many ways Christians may already derive from consumerism their assumptions about their own identity and the good life they pursue. In short, world views inform without delighting and teach without truly persuading. As a result, world views are powerless against manipulation by the market. Consumerism has an astonishing capacity to absorb other world views into its own, turning even the most antagonistic ones into potentially profitable niche markets. Vincent Miller points out that Jeremiads against the excesses of capitalism sell quite as well as consumer goods. [Consumerism] seems to be capable of selling anything, including the values of its most committed opponents. It turned the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto into a marketing opportunity. In mini-malls throughout the land stacks of glossy paperback editions were placed next to cash registers in major chain bookstores to tempt impulse purchases. (Miller 2005: 18) Very few Marxists in the West today remain unsullied by the late capitalism they deride – they just buy different goods and services than those who prefer Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. The same is



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true for Christians: we can avow a Christian faith and yet continue to behave and act primarily as consumers. Marketers know that most people have an astonishing ability to justify behaviours that contradict their self-perception. Be a devout Christian or a Marxist if you like – and here are some things that you can buy to show everyone else who you are. Christians are free to buy their range of products – floppy bibles, briefly fashionable books like Purpose Driven Life and The Shack, films and television series, and a whole host of other things – or pay for services like expensive workshops, retreats, and travel groups. From the perspective of marketers, there’s nothing that distinguishes any of these activities from those of any other consumer tribe. Christian consumers are no different than football fans or Trekkies. There’s little evidence that commitment to Christianity has much influence over consumer spending – indeed, in the West a sizeable proportion of consumers are Christians. Ultimately, conceiving of the Christian dilemma chiefly in terms of world views is an inadequate solution to the plight of Christianity in consumer society. Augustine’s conception of the Christian life as a rhetorical contest provides a far better theological explanation for that dilemma. Augustine recognized that the Christian faith is confronted by persuasive appeals to the emotions more than intellectual arguments to the mind. To base the Christian response on choice is to show up too late to the battle. By then the market has already disposed people to make the choices it prefers and to pursue a vision of happiness it has prepared them to desire. What Augustine’s rhetorical theology teaches us is that an effective strategy against consumerism needs to begin by taking the battle to consumerism’s own territory: the heart.

The Christian dilemma – A rhetorical contest Augustine’s rhetorical theology sheds light on why teaching people about a Christian world view has little effect: it informs without delighting. But we still haven’t sufficiently explained the dilemma faced by Christians living their ordinary lives within consumerism. All that we’ve accomplished so far is to show that the concept of

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world views is as inadequate in solving that dilemma as the Law was in addressing human sin. Let’s return now to Augustine to see if there’s a more helpful way of understanding the Christian dilemma within consumer culture. Broadly speaking, we can put that dilemma in the following terms: Individuals across the globe find themselves from an early age within a rhetorical community that shapes them as consumers, orienting them by its persistent rhetoric towards pursuing marketderived ideals of happiness through their consumption of goods and services. This pursuit happens within numerous niche groups and consumer tribes that share values, interests, and behaviours of consumptions, which nuance how consumers understand themselves as consumers. While men and women may convert from one rhetorical tribe to another, they can’t easily escape them altogether (the pervasiveness of the market won’t allow them) nor do they often wish to do so since the delights they experience are mostly satisfying and temporarily fulfilling. But complete fulfilment isn’t ever possible because the same market that provides delights also unsettles those delights to create opportunities for further profit. That’s the day-to-day experience of consumers in the Western world. The only ones to live apart from that world are the destitute and the mentally disabled: the ‘underclass’ whom Zygmunt Bauman refers to as the ‘collateral casualties of consumerism’ (Bauman 2007: 126–8). People aren’t coerced into becoming and remaining consumers. They relish that vocation because they’ve been persuaded that freedom means having the capacity to choose their own path towards a market-derived good life. The experience of making a choice – the symbolic act of enjoying personal freedom – is so powerful that mostly we don’t concern ourselves with the reason we make one choice over another. Indeed, if the choice results in personal pleasure or satisfaction then we aren’t overly concerned if we’re told we’ve been manipulated into making that choice. That’s just good salesmanship. I know that I’ve been conditioned to prefer Coke over Pepsi (and I remember choosing Pepsi in a taste test when I was a boy) but that knowledge hasn’t changed which refreshment I more regularly buy. The power of consumerism lies in its extraordinary rhetoric – the innumerable and persistent ways that it suggests ideas, stokes desires through delight, and persuades people to consent to shop and



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make purchases. Armed with mass entertainment, aided by a largely unregulated market, and communicated through an increasing number of devices, advertisers, and marketers – the orators of consumerism – can keep us constantly within earshot of their persuasive speeches. As a result, we return again and again to shop. Shopping and buying are, if you will, the liturgical consummation of being a consumer: the goal of almost all advertising and the supreme symbolic act of consumerism. As theologians and sociologists alike point out, the temples of today are therefore the malls where we can join other consumers in the liturgical worship of consumerism (Smith 2009: 19–23). As we’ve seen, one can describe all this as a world view. But people aren’t part of this world view through choice (ironically, given the role of choice within consumerism). We’ve been persuaded to be consumers through the shaping of our delights and desires from the cradle. The victory of the market’s rhetoric isn’t due to its intellectual arguments or even to shared stories, symbols, and practices; it’s due to the hold the experience and delight of being a consumer has over our hearts. Likely, most people won’t even stop long to consider consumerism as a world view or to think that there’s anything distinct or strange about how they understand themselves and the world. And even when we see communities come under strain, local flavour absorbed into the McDonaldization that some sociologists lament (Ritzer 2000), and the planet draw ever closer towards ecological catastrophe, we can’t easily change our habits. Our hearts won’t let us. When consumers convert to Christianity or Christians try to take their faith seriously, therefore, they can’t easily choose no longer to be consumers. They continue to remain at every level a part of the rhetorical community of consumerism, which continues to bombard them with delights and to shape their perceptions. Should they study Scripture, the doctrines of the creed, or even literature distinguishing the Christian world view from the consumer one, it’s unlikely that this information will challenge the rhetoric they continue to hear constantly within consumer culture. There’s every chance that the churches to which they belong won’t even encourage them to consider their lives as consumers – few imagine that conversion to Christianity might involve a conversion away from anything other than a vague notion of non-belief (i.e. atheism, agnosticism, or another religion). Indeed, if they belong to a church

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that mimics consumer culture (through, for example, its use of entertainment) they may even be disposed towards conceiving of their faith in ways that diminishes or even removes any sense of a dilemma. Churches that promote a prosperity gospel are good examples of this. When Christians become actively engaged within a church community, however, they do come into regular contact with an alternative way of understanding the world. They hear Scripture read in worship and expounded in sermons and perhaps begin to study the Bible and Christian teachings. Much of this informs their minds and that knowledge possibly unsettles their prior understanding of the world. That Christian teaching also starts to inform their conscience, providing them with a new sense of how they ought to live. I should pray more, go to church more, do something to help the hungry, and try to be more forgiving. In fact, encountering moral and social obligations is itself a distinct and unfamiliar part of becoming a Christian – converts encounter a wide array of oughts that encourage them to think of the world as the world, as that from which one can stand apart. In short, they’re introduced to Christian ethics ‘that enable us to rightly see the world and to perceive how we continue to be possessed by the world’ (Hauerwas 1995: 156). But at this point, Christian converts haven’t been freed from consumerism – they have only been made aware that they’ve been in bondage. They know there’s an alternative; in converting, they’ve accepted notionally that this alternative offers freedom. What else do we mean by salvation than eternal freedom? Yet, translating this knowledge into a manner of living is more difficult, not least because the obligations of being a Christian are less persuasive than the apparent freedom and fun offered by the market. Why would anyone embrace obligations if their notion of happiness is based on the total freedom to be whomever they want to be? Let’s now refer to Augustine’s use of Cicero’s rhetorical scheme to understand what has happened to these Christian converts. In terms of proving, pleasing, and persuading they became Christians because they encountered the gospel, delighted in it, and were persuaded to convert. As new Christians they recognize that the world view of Christianity differs from the world and, as far as they do understand the teachings of their faith, intellectually accept much of it. They were sufficiently delighted by that knowledge to



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be persuaded to become Christians and consent to the message of the gospel. But this acceptance no more frees them from the suggestions and delights of consumerism than it does from those of sin. In a theological sense, they’ve been freed through baptism from bondage to the world but continue to feel very powerfully the allure of that world. The old identities, ideas of freedom, and ideals of happiness continue to hold sway and to draw them away from their new-found faith. In terms of Augustine’s movement from bondage to sin to God’s victorious delight, their experience of being a Christian in a consumer culture is the contemporary guise of being in the third stage of salvation or ‘under grace’. They began as thorough-going consumers with no hope of escape. Then they were presented with Christian teaching and shown, if only implicitly, how to live within an alternative society (the church). But this knowledge didn’t become faith until their hearts had been won over to that teaching. Not until God poured his delight into their hearts through the reception of the Holy Spirit did they begin to desire God. But that outpouring hasn’t so overwhelmed them that they now desire only God. Suggestions and the old delights of the former life still tug at their hearts, tempting them to forget about trying to be faithful Christians and to enjoy instead the freedom of being first and foremost consumers. Likely, they now desire God alongside or even as part of the happiness purveyed by the market. God has granted grace but not rest – the affections are pulled to and fro by conflicted loyalties. Being ‘under grace’ then describes the dilemma of being Christian in a consumer culture, the twenty-first-century experience of being torn between the flesh and the spirit: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’ And so, finally, in terms of Augustine’s rhetorical theology itself, contemporary converts find themselves caught amid a battle between two competing rhetorics of delight: God and the world. The rhetoric of the market seeks to persuade Christians to continue to view themselves as consumers-by-vocation and to sustain habits that keep their hearts attached to pursuing its idea of happiness by purchasing goods and services. At the same time, the market seeks to incorporate the church within its own rhetoric, effectively monetizing the gospel so that Christians can practice their faith without undermining their identity as consumers. The delights the market offers try not only to persuade Christians to

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remain consumers but also to blind them to the costly reality that life demands and evokes: exhaustion of resources, exploitation of cheap labour, and ecological degradation (to name only a few). But Christians aren’t left on their own to resist this world. They’ve received the Spirit, God’s own eloquence, which challenges the world’s destructive rhetoric by persuading consumers to become active members of the Body of Christ. God’s eloquence is a manifestation of his love that draws the faithful away from their bondage towards the God who has saved them. The spiritual delights experienced transcend this world and are therefore beyond the reach of the market – love expressed through prayer, sacraments, selfless service, and deep communion can’t be monetized: the market has no means for making grace a commodity. This rhetorical contest occurs within the theatre of the heart rather than the mind and the laurels of victory go to the rhetoric that lays the greater claim to the affections. This rhetorical contest is felt and experienced as moral dilemma, a tender conscience, and as an awareness that one isn’t living as one ought. Seen from this perspective, the contemporary experience of Christian dilemma comports well with an Augustinian reading of Romans 7. Trained thoroughly in the art of rhetoric, Augustine understood clearly that ideas, beliefs, and teachings aren’t sufficient to convert and shape people’s identities. They must also be eloquent so that people will delight in them. If one wants to think in terms of competing world views, then one should recognize that world views aren’t static or mute but reach out to incorporate new members by their eloquence. The so-called battle between competing world views isn’t an intellectual one; it’s rhetorical. They present themselves in ways that claim the sources of our delights and capture our hearts by painting a picture of the good life that also delights. The difficulty faced by Christians is that consumerism has mastered this process – armed with the world’s resources and propelled by human ingenuity, it has become a perfect this-worldly rhetorical community of delight. Against this version of the flesh, not even the most spiritually minded Christian individual has a hope of resisting. Therein lies the biggest challenge facing churches today. So long as the dilemma of being a Christian in a consumer culture remains an individual experience, the market will win almost every time. Without an actual experience of a community rooted in and enlivened by the rhetoric of God’s delight, most Christians



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will find conforming to the world more than to God hard to resist. They’ll remain every inch the same consumers as everybody else. Put another way, they’ll continue to be the kind of Christians that consumer culture doesn’t mind: ones who aren’t subversive of its identities, perceptions, and delights and who are happy to live out their faith as a sanctified niche within the market of delights. To begin to challenge the rhetoric of consumerism, churches must learn how to be rhetorical communities of delight where people are encouraged and disposed to recognize and receive the true delights of God. It’s not enough to present the Christian faith simply as a world view produced by the narrative of God’s redemption. The church must find ways of encouraging people to delight in those stories, to desire to conform to its presentation of reality, and to draw from it a sense of identity and freedom that orients them towards God and refuses to exploit others and the earth. To become rhetorical communities of delight requires two things: to be actual communities in which people can belong and to be places of delight that actively seek to challenge and undermine the rhetoric of consumer culture. To see how this can be done and how we should reshape how the church understands its mission and ministry, we must turn in the final part of this book to two of Augustine’s most influential works: The City of God and On Christian Doctrine.

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PART THREE

The mission and ministry of God’s rhetoric

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6 The church as a rhetorical community

In 2015, the Pew Forum released its findings that between 2007 and 2014, religious affiliation in the United States dropped sharply, especially among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics (Street 2015). Even more alarmingly, the survey found that ‘while many U.S. religious groups are aging, the unaffiliated are comparatively young – and getting younger, on average, over time. As a rising cohort of highly unaffiliated Millennials reaches adulthood, the median age of unaffiliated adults has dropped to 36, down from 38 in 2007 and far lower than the general (adult) population’s median age of 46.’ In short, churches are attracting only an increasingly narrow segment of the older demographic. What has alarmed many churches is that this sharp decline comes after years of their retooling themselves to meet the changing spiritual needs of consumer culture. Some strands of Evangelicalism, for example, have tried to adopt and reorient the practices of consumerism towards the gospel – in effect, repackaging the substance of the faith in forms developed by consumer culture. They present worship in more entertaining formats, draw from popular tastes in music to compose praise songs, and use the resources of marketing to develop brand loyalty (Moore 1994: 204–55). In a sense, these churches have created an alternative consumer culture where the presence of Jesus is pervasive; indeed, Jesus himself becomes a kind of logo that assures shoppers that their goods and services are wholesome and permissible: a brand Jesus (Stevenson 2007).

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In fact, almost all mainstream churches have sought to adjust themselves to consumerism in similar ways. Since the 1960s, mainline churches have regularly debated how they can culturally align their policies and practices to support progressive movements within a fast-changing society. At the same time, however, the issues confronting the church have been addressed increasingly by Christians formed in and influenced by the expanding rhetoric of the market. Questions about identity, personal freedom, psychological wholeness, and personal spirituality have tended to eclipse traditional concerns about doctrine and salvation. Without really recognizing what was happening, Christianity in Western democracies has become ‘one of a number of “cultured” and “leisured” activities that individuals now purchase or subscribe to’ (Percy 2005: 48). Christianity a lifestyle choice made by some consumers for its perceived spiritual or psychological benefits. In all the debates about the relationship between church and state, few seem to recognize that the church in question now struggles to be other than a peculiar tribe within the consumer culture – all has become incorporated into the rhetorical community of the market. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, co-authored by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, came as a thunderclap because it directly challenged the engagement by mainstream Protestantism with American culture. The book calls for the church to rethink its mission in a post-Christendom world by conceiving of itself as a distinct and visible colony of ‘resident aliens’ that only seeks to transform the world by being a faithful alternative to that world. In one of their most quoted passages, they declare: From a Christian point of view, the world needs the church, not to help the world run more smoothly or to make the world a better and safer place for Christians to live. Rather, the world needs the church because, without the church, the world does not know who it is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers. (Hauerwas and Willimon 1989: 94)



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To accomplish this, the church must understand its own narrative  – the biblical story of God’s creation and redemption of the world – and form its members in virtue through practices that are rooted in and convey that narrative. The church must be a ‘story-formed community’ with politics and ethics distinct from the world (Hauerwas 1981: 7–86). Against the complaint of critics that this amounts to a sectarian withdrawal from the world, Hauerwas has subsequently argued that no signal for retreat is intended, that, in fact, the church can’t withdraw because it’s surrounded. I think Hauerwas is basically right but that he doesn’t go far enough. The situation of his colony of resident aliens isn’t that it’s surrounded but that it has been overrun by the world – the rhetoric of consumerism has undermined the faithful retelling of the story he makes central to the church’s identity. As a result, for the church to be faithful to and tell its own story, it must rediscover its own eloquence: its own resources of persuasion and its sources of delight. The church must learn to retell the story of God’s saving act eloquently in order to contest the rhetoric of the market. For the church to reclaim its mission, therefore, it must first strive to be an intentional community of rhetoric that eloquently calls people to participate in its story of redemptive reality by appealing to their imaginations and their hearts. Augustine preferred the image of a city to that of a colony. In his great work, The City of God, written in the aftermath of the Visigothic sack of Rome, he depicts two cities: the earthly city and the city of God. What distinguishes the two cities from each other are their ultimate loves: either the ‘love of God carried as far as contempt of self’ or ‘self-love to the point of contempt of God’ (TCG 14.28). The cities, however, are alike insofar as each is ‘a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love’ (TCG 19.24). What separates one from the other is the object of its love: God versus the self. And these two loves place each city in opposition to the other. As we have seen continually, however, if the two cities are characterized by their ultimate loves, then they likewise are defined by their ultimate delights – there can be no love without delight. The city of God delights in God while the earthly city delights in the self. Moreover, these two loves and delights are such that the love of God leads to freedom from the self while the love of self

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ends in bondage to the devil. Two cities defined by opposing loves and divided between God and the devil provide the social setting for Augustine’s rhetorical battle. The contest of delights that results in the divided will of individuals is actually the experience of a more fundamental contest between two rhetorical communities, each shaped and directed by delight but each also leading to opposing ends: bondage or freedom, death or life, blindness or contemplation, damnation or salvation. Thus, the rhetorical contest we’ve followed so far is actually a contest of communities with rival political discourses that persuade their members towards their respective loves. A rhetorical perspective on Augustine’s City of God helps us begin to solve the dilemma of living as Christians within consumer culture. If consumerism functions like Augustine’s diabolical community of rhetoric, shaping identities and notions of freedom in destructive ways, then the church needs to respond by recognizing that it too is a rhetorical community with its own sources of eloquence for drawing people towards true freedom and an identity rooted in God. The church’s mission, therefore, necessarily involves persuading people to escape their rhetorical bondage to consumerism – Christian freedom today is manifested in part by the capacity to be someone who’s identity, desires, and happiness don’t depend on the purchase of goods and services. To accomplish this, the church needs to rediscover the eloquence of God so that it can be a community where people are formed into the love of God by discovering how to delight in whatever leads towards him and oppose whatever doesn’t.

People, place, and time: The wellimagined Christian community To argue this point, however, I need to begin by clearly establishing what I mean by ‘community’. Any community worth its name must be a formative one; anything less is an association, network, or the like. We saw earlier how social psychologists during the early twentieth century analysed how belonging to a social group generates a mental image of the world, a pseudo-environment or fiction, that we call reality. A more recent and (I think) useful



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approach to this social apprehension of reality is found in Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age. Taylor uses the idea of ‘social imaginary’ to explain ‘the ways in which they [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations’ (Taylor 2007: 171). The imaginary precedes theory (e.g. sociology) and refers instead to ‘the way ordinary people (rather than just an elite) imagine their social surroundings’, which produces social practices and ‘a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor 2007: 171–2). Taylor explains further: Our social imaginary … incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice. (Taylor 2007: 172) The social imaginary also resists being comprehensively defined (differing in this way from world views) and is therefore hard to explain to outsiders. It forms the background that insiders take for granted and is the material from which ideas are formed and communicated. Taylor explains further, If the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that it is the practice which largely carries the understanding. At any given time, we can speak of the ‘repertory’ of collective actions at the disposal of a given group of society. These are the common actions which they know how to undertake, all the way from the general election, involving the whole society, to knowing how to strike up a polite but uninvolved conversation with a casual group in the reception hall. The discrimination we have to make to carry those off, knowing whom to speak to and when and how, carry an implicit ‘map’ of social space, of what

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kinds of people we can associate with in what ways in what circumstances. (Taylor 2007: 173) We engage with the world from our social imaginary before we try to develop social theories to describe it. Taylor asserts that the social imaginary ‘draws on our whole world, that is, our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in history’ (Taylor 2007: 174). It’s something that develops through the shared experience of belonging to a people within a place over a span of time. I think we can grasp Taylor’s description better by considering myths. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a false story. Myths, however, are the shared imagination that underpins how societies picture and express their world through stories, metaphors, rituals, and symbols. In her book, The Myths We Live By, Mary Midgley describes myths as the ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape meaning’ (2003: 1). Thus, myths are key to the social formation of meaning within an inhabited world – they grow out of and provide the imaginative framework for the communal experience of being-in-the-world. Myths, however, are larger than stories or lore preserved in books or oral tradition, though they depend on these forms of transmission. The stories that we call myths and legends tap into a larger, indefinable sense of the world that situates them and connects them together. Those stories are only authentic to the degree that they successfully connect with the imaginative landscape of those who retell and hear them. So, for example, Egyptian myths could only have arisen within ancient Egyptian culture and the ancient Egyptian culture could only have arisen and endured where the Egyptian gods were worshiped. Myths and meaning are, therefore, fused together to create a way of interpreting our environment. Mythic stories and legends are too closely intertwined with the social identity and practice of the people who retell them to be separated by us outsiders. In that sense, it’s as difficult for us really to know what Greeks or Romans meant by wisdom, honour, or family as it is for us to understand how they viewed the world. Their mythic stories, rituals, and their settings evoked a world that appealed primarily to a social imagination shaped by the other stories, practices, and customs of



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that pictured reality; in turn, the social imagination flavoured with inexpressible emotional nuances the meaning of things. To step outside a myth to study and examine it (as happened, for example, with the introduction of ‘religious studies’) is to begin the process of converting from one myth to another. In his Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, J. R. R. Tolkien explains: Its [myth’s] defender is … at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. (Tolkien 1936: 15) We can’t properly dissect myths because they’re both the lens by which we fundamentally view the world and the foundation for a shared imagination by which we belong to a community. This presents a difficulty for those who argue that the church should promote and develop its Christian world view – the very act of rationalizing the Christian myth into a comprehensible world view is to act upon the gospel as an outsider, as one who pretends to have a distanced objectivity. Finally, myths create habits and practices that dispose our hearts towards common objects of love. In his two volumes, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith argues that these pre-cognitive habits develop from routines and rituals that ‘inscribe ongoing habits into our character, such that they become second nature to us. According to research on the “new unconsciousness,” such dispositions have a kind of “automaticity” about them: they are the default tendencies and the inclinations that we follow without thinking’ (Smith 2009: 80). Some of these practices are intentional (like learning to play an instrument through repeated practice) while others aren’t (such as putting on your clothes in the same order each morning). Both kinds, however, inscribe knowledge into our bodies so that we respond in certain ways without the need for conscious thought. A toddler finds walking difficult until his limbs have memorized the movements and balance needed to make walking automatic. A concert pianist’s fingers flit across the keyboard without her mind needing to think about where they should go next. Smith points to research that shows that

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95 per cent of our knowledge consists of pre-cognitive habits that we never chose in a deliberate way and argues that these practices shape our intentional actions and thoughts profoundly (Smith 2009: 81). In other words, our rational choices are the pinnacle of an iceberg composed mainly of unintentional, unthinking, and unchosen habits and dispositions. And this is precisely the region where rhetoric impacts us most. Smith divides these dispositions into thin and thick habits. A thin habit is a mundane practice, like brushing teeth, that doesn’t directly impact our identity or direct our loves. Thick habits, on the other hand, are meaningful practices that ‘play a significant role in shaping our identity’ (Smith 2009: 82). These can be religious practices like attending Sunday services or secular ones such as shopping at a mall. Both encode beliefs at an emotional level and dispose us to perceive and interpret the world in distinct ways. Smith cautions against setting thin and thick practices too far apart since many mundane practices connect closely with meaningful ones. He concludes: In short, there are meaning-laden, identity-forming practices that subtly shape us precisely because they grab hold of our love – they are automating our desire and action without our conscious recognition … what might appear to be a normal, everyday habit of going to the mall is actually a deeply formative ritual practice that subtly but powerfully shapes and aims our desire. Though we treat it as a thin practice, it is really a thick practice pointed at an end that is antithetical to being a disciple of Jesus. (Smith 2009: 84) Taken together, the array of thin and thick practices that form the structure of our lives create ‘liturgies’, which ‘capture our hearts by capturing our imaginations’ and produce rituals that orient our loves (Smith 2009: 88). In Imagining the Kingdom, Smith draws upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu to examine these ‘liturgies’ in terms of habitus or a disposition to construct our world in particular ways through enduring systems of communal, communicable, structuring practices (Smith 2013: 81). These practices are akin to Aristotle’s ‘second nature’ or habits so deeply embedded in our minds and bodies that we perform them without reflection. And because they



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endure and can be shared, ‘I will be “at home” in a community of practice just to the extent that the shared habitus of the community has been inscribed in me, absorbed into my “individual history”. I learn how to be in community by acquiring from the community and its institutions a habitus’ (Smith 2013: 81–2). Again, most of this process is subconscious – though it doesn’t preclude critical reflection – conditioning our imagination and disposing us to perceive the world in distinct ways. Consequently, belonging to a community of practice shapes how we perceive the world more profoundly than the deliberate choices we make or the beliefs we hold. So, for example, I never chose to be a twentyfirst-century consumer, rather my belonging to a consumer culture that inscribed in me the various practices of mass consumption – shopping, watching TV, surfing the Internet, driving a car, listening to music on a portable device, and so forth – determined that identity. But people aren’t simply automatons mimicking the practices of their community without any freedom to choose or to stand apart from social norms. Smith addresses this point by arguing that habitus refers to a disposition rather than a necessity. Our social practices constitute a world in which we have freedom to act; but those social practices also weight our judgements so that we’re likely to act and believe in some ways more than others. Smith explains, As a social being acting in the world, I’m not an unconstrained ‘free’ creature ‘without inertia’; neither am I the passive victim of external causes and determining forces. Neither mechanical determinism nor libertarian freedom can really make sense of our being-in-the-world because our freedom is both ‘conditioned and conditional.’ Both our perception and our action are conditioned, but as conditioned, it is possible for both to be spontaneous and improvisational. I learn how to constitute my world from others, but I learn to constitute my world. The ‘I’ that perceives is always already a ‘we’. My perception is communal, a debt I owe. (Smith 2013: 84) So, a young man born and bred in the Smokey Mountains is free to become a progressive who opposes gun ownership, but he’s much more likely to choose to be a conservative gun advocate; an elderly

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woman from Greenwich Village is free to go regularly to a biker bar for beers with her friends, but she would probably be thought eccentric for doing so. Because we feel most ourselves within our communities of practices, however, we hardly ever perceive our social conditioning as restrictions – they’re just normal. Smith regularly uses the word ‘dispose’ when discussing how social imaginary and liturgies shape how we conceive our world and the loves that we pursue. This ‘disposing’ isn’t normally coercive – the social imaginary in which we’ve been formed doesn’t compel us through violence to imagine our world as we do – but rather is persuasive. Social imaginaries, landscapes, liturgies, and habits conspire to convince us to conceive the world in ways agreeable to and in harmony with the communities to which we belong. Thus, social imaginaries or myths are inherently rhetorical. They don’t appeal to our rational minds. They aren’t shaping us through intellectual arguments but by appealing to our affections. Because we’re surrounded by and immersed in our social imaginaries, their rhetoric is persistent, constantly persuading us through our experience of daily life, the people we encounter, and our repertoire of thin and thick habits to imagine the world socially. The communities that do that most powerfully are the ones to which we’re most strongly attached – even if we convince ourselves otherwise. The social imaginary, therefore, provides the background for communities to exist as such – it’s the shared reality that persuades Augustine’s ‘multitude of rational beings’ to unite through their ‘common objects of love’. The social imaginary and the loves it engenders are fundamentally what separate one community from another, even if its members are physically co-mingled with those of other communities. Thus, from a sociological perspective, one can say that Augustine’s two cities are distinguished by not only the ‘common objects of love’ they desire but also the social reality they imagine and enact through their respective liturgies. As Augustine argues in the first part of the City of God, the pagan Roman pursued ‘self-love to the point of contempt of God’ because that was what his or her reality demanded. That the Early Church recognized this to be the case can be seen in its demand for intensive catechesis before baptism. Conversion required the baptism of the imagination if the love of God was to be pursued amid a society of pagans.



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In the first two of his 2001 Stob Lectures, Oliver O’Donovan argues that Augustine’s description of a commonwealth (which amended Cicero’s own) emphasizes the role of love in defining a community: ‘The creative miracle that by sharing a common view of the good, we become a “multitude” no longer, but a “people”, capable of common action, susceptible to common suffering, participating in a common identity’ (O’Donovan 2002: 21–2). These shared ‘objects of community-forming love’ further shape their communities morally so that ‘the better the objects of this agreement, the better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse the people’ (TCG 19.24). O’Donovan explains: For the underlying unity of knowledge and love means that love can take form only as a cognizance of reality, adequate or inadequate. There is an objective measure by which we may differentiate ‘better’ from ‘worse’ loves, which is the adequacy of their grasp of reality. The loves of some communities attach to concrete material goods as their final term, while the love of others treat those material goods as mediations of spiritual realities… . A view of politics as a choice between economic systems for redistributing material goods would strike Augustine as a choice between two roads to Hell. (O’Donovan 2002: 23) For Augustine, therefore, Roman history isn’t accidentally filled with violence, war, and self-aggrandizement; these were the inevitable characteristics of a community shaped by its primary love of self. Likewise, it’s no accident that our society is marked by waste, fragmentation, ecological destruction, political instability, and growing inequalities; these are the inevitable characteristic of a community shaped by its primary love of a personal freedom to choose facilitated by those whose primary love is profit. Next, O’Donovan explains that a scattered multitude only becomes a community by people communicating their common objects of love with each other. Community and communication derive from the same Latin root, indicating that sharing and communication are the essential prerequisites for establishing communities: ‘Those who are partners to communication (koinonia in a verbal sense) form a community (koinonia in the concrete sense). They become a “we” in relation to the object, whatever it is, that is common to them’ (O’Donovan 2002: 26–7). As a result,

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words and signs are the essential foundation for communities; they must be transmitted and shared for a social imaginary to be evoked and sustained. A picture of reality, therefore, arises through a social discourse that invests all other goods with cultural meaning; it involves not merely a common use of material goods but a common understanding of their significance. Out of the simplest material communication, then, it weaves complex cultural communications. What among herding animals is simply the peaceful sharing of forage, among humans becomes a shared meal: a sign of friendship, an affirmation of shared purpose, a pledge of loyalty, and many other things. (O’Donovan 2002: 28) Moreover, this communication of the ‘objects of communityforming love’ allows the community to conceive of itself as a whole: ‘Common objects of love generate common self-understanding’ (O’Donovan 2002: 28). Thus, through communicating their social imaginary, people gain a perspective not only on the world but also on themselves. Finally, communication enables the continuity and development of the objects of love and social reality over time. This is properly called tradition or ‘the reserve of practices and communication patterns received from the past – but only those which continue to command recognition, that is, which have been effectively communicated to the present time. The essential thing about tradition is that it creates social continuity’ (O’Donovan 2002: 32). Before we continue, let’s stop for a moment to survey the ground we’ve now covered. A community can only be formative if it’s underpinned by a social imaginary, communicated through stories and social practices that bind people together according to their common objects of love. Communities are therefore the reality they embrace at a social level; their reality is communicated through their common objects of love. If the nature of love is both to delight and create desire, then we can also say that communities are defined by their common objects of desire and delight. In that sense, members of a community not only perceive reality and themselves in a particular way, they also want, even need to do so. If the objects didn’t delight and produce desires, they wouldn’t have been loved in the first place. Thus, they shape communities



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through their emotional appeal; the capacity of common objects of love to delight invokes the desire to share and pursue them. So, for example, if consumers didn’t delight in personal freedom, choice, and self-expression then consumerism would soon collapse. For it to continue, the social discourse must sustain that delight even in the face of countervailing social experiences such as social fragmentation and environmental degradation. Much of this, as we have seen, was anticipated by Cicero. In his myth about the formation of civilization, what turned scattered and savage humanity into a humane civilization was fundamentally words. It was the capacity of the great man of wisdom and eloquence to communicate divine and political truths that enabled an otherwise beastly humanity to gather as a people and to pursue those goods that are beneficial and virtuous. What Cicero recognized and emphasized, however, is that only eloquent communication can produce an enduring community. Signs and representations can’t even emerge unless they appeal and persuade people to accept them as such and subsequently to respond to them in a way that binds them together. Equally, words lose their effectiveness when they no longer persuade people to accept and respond to them. In a sense, all forms of social communication – be it a shared social imaginary, practices, and habits, or even political discourse – must be supremely capable of informing, delighting, and persuading if they’re to be effective. Otherwise, the proposed reality and loves are as mute as Cicero’s wisdom without eloquence. Augustine, however, departed from Cicero in a key way by rejecting the possibility of great orators within the commonwealth. As we saw earlier, he believed that both true wisdom and true eloquence are beyond the power of any person in a fallen world. In his book, Christ and the Just Society, Robert Dodaro follows this conviction to its political ends. Augustine begins by arguing that the social discourse on which civilizations depend is rooted in deception. ‘This deception, which is communicated through different forms of discourse, such as oratory, religious ritual, games and theatrical spectacles, philosophy and literature, is … the primary means of ensuring continued ignorance and weakness. For Augustine, the fallen soul’s ignorance and weakness are the reason why language can invent and sustain a counterfeit concept of justice’ (Dodaro 2004: 66). Original sin undermines a truly just social discourse from the start.

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Even after the Fall, however, language remains vital for the establishment of civilization. In a sense, Augustine accepts Cicero’s myth but sees the resulting civilization as compromised by sin and deception. His reason for this is that the earthly city is ‘patterned on Satan’s rhetoric’ (Dodaro 2004: 67). Instead of a great orator whose wisdom and eloquence draw people together into a virtuous civilization, Satan ‘arouses in Eve and Adam a preference for selfdeception through deceitful but persuasive speech, culminating in the false promise, “You shall be like gods”’ (Dodaro 2004: 67–8). This persuasive self-delusion becomes the prototype for all political discourse within the earthly city. Thus, Augustine portrays the origins of the earthly city as the antithesis of Cicero’s myth in On Invention: fallen humanity was brought together not by divine wisdom but diabolical falsehood. Christ is Augustine’s answer to the rhetoric of the earthly city. Rejecting Cicero’s emphasis on great men armed with wisdom and eloquence as essential to the life and health of the city, Augustine argues that only Christ, perfectly just and humble, can fulfil the role of a wise orator. The city of God is just not because it has great men and women who exemplify and eloquently express justice but because the just Christ, into whom the faithful are incorporated, heals them of their ignorance and weakness. ‘Augustine maintains that justice cannot be known except in Christ, and that, as founder (conditor) and ruler (rector), Christ forms the just society in himself. United with Christ, members of his body constitute the whole, just Christ (Christus totus iustus), which is the city of God, the true commonwealth, and the locus for the revelation of justice’ (Dodaro 2004: 72). And this is accomplished by the sacramental signs of Scripture and the saints persuading Christians to pursuing virtue (Dodaro 2004: 115–214). These are fundamentally the manifestation of God’s rhetoric that defines and sustains the city of God. What might this mean within the context of a formative community? As we have seen, keys to any community are the social imaginary and discourse that communicate the shared loves that characterize that community. From Augustine’s perspective, any community that isn’t rooted in Christ is based on deception and falsehood which reinforce human ignorance and weakness and bind its members to Satan. Within the community of the church, however, social discourse – rooted in Scripture and manifested



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in the saints – becomes the means of grace. The Christian social imaginary is a vehicle of divine eloquence through which God’s love and delight are poured out through the reception of the Holy Spirit. Social discourse and the imaginary are therefore God’s oratory on which the heavenly commonwealth, the church, depends.

The church’s rhetorical mission We now stand at a point where we can explain both the dilemma of individual Christians within consumer society and the social nature of the rhetorical contest between God and the devil. This then will finally provide us with a secure vantage for considering how the church participates in the mission of God. In the process, I hope to make clear just how wrong-headed and self-defeating much of the work of the church has been since the emergence of consumer culture. From Augustine’s perspective, the world consists of two comingled societies: the earthly city and the city of God. What characterizes these cities are their loves: the love of God as opposed to the love of self. This theological perspective is enacted and manifested in the different social realities that undergird each city, one rooted in falsehood and deception and the other in the wholly just Christ. These realities also express the common objects of love that characterize each city. The earthly city’s self-love produces a reality manifested by a desire for glory that ends in violence, war, empire, and perpetual restlessness. On the other hand, the heavenly city’s love of God produces a reality characterized by a humility that engenders communion, justice, happiness, and peace. The reality that underpins each city is communicated through the social discourse, practices, and habits that dispose or persuade individuals to pursue the loves the community shares. The experience of belonging to a community of commonly loved objects eloquently evokes a social reality that manifests certain loves while masking or even deprecating other ones. The social reality of the earthly city makes the loves embraced by the city of God unappealing and incomprehensible; likewise, the city of God rejects the glory, violence, and pride of the earthly city. In each case, what determines the social reality imagined and the loves pursued is delight. Delight functions as the eloquence that

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draws a multitude of people together to share their common objects of love. Thus, the earthly city not only characterizes itself by violence and the pursuit of glory but also delights in these activities due to its self-love. The delight in empire manifests the love of self and nurtures that disordered love to the point of destruction; even the mightiest empires end in ruin. The supposedly great Romans – men and women who achieved glory – were eloquent representatives of that self-love, signifying to the Roman commonwealth the heights to which its members could aspire and encouraging them to do so to the ultimate ruin of all. In a similar fashion, men and women today who achieve fame and fortune eloquently represent the apogee of consumer lifestyles, encouraging others to pursue fame and fortune at a level that simply can’t be sustained for long. The contest between the two cities is the rhetorical contest between God and the devil writ large. They’re two rhetorical communities, manifesting different loves and governed by different forms of delight. The earthly city, originating in the falsehood of the devil, binds people to each other and to their own eventual destruction by worldly and illicit delights that draw them away from God into a dehumanizing self-love. On the other hand, the city of God binds people to each other and to their own salvation by spiritual delights that draw them through wisdom towards God and an eternal Sabbath. Each city depends on eloquence both to maintain its own cohesion and keep others from being drawn into the other city – the eloquence of the devil seeks to retain people within their bondage to sin while the eloquence of God seeks to free them from bondage by becoming citizens of God’s city. That fundamentally social and communal contest is nonetheless experienced by individuals as the divided will of Romans 7 that arises from the barrage of suggestions and delights, seeking to shape our choices and obtain our consent. The dilemma felt by Christians within consumer culture, therefore, can be interpreted as a dilemma of citizenship. On the one hand, this dilemma is the unavoidable experience of being a member of the city of God amid the earthly city. The eloquence of that diabolical community – its social imaginary, discourse, practices, habits, and symbols – constantly seeks to persuade Christians to renounce their heavenly citizenship by basing their identities on self-love through the embrace of worldly delights. On the other hand, that dilemma grows more acute when the eloquence of the city of God grows quiet, which happens when the church



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fails to communicate eloquently its own social imaginary, discourse, practices, habits, and symbols. Unless these vehicles of God’s own delight undergird the community to which individual Christians belong, they’ll find it incredibly hard to resist defining themselves by the destructive delights of the world. The mission of the church, therefore, is fundamentally a mission of delight: to strive to be a formative community of rhetoric that can persuade and dispose Christians to pursue the love of God. This requires a shift in perspective. The church must exist first and foremost as a community of delight if it’s to be a rhetorical community that ‘re-calibrates’ hearts to pursue the love of God (Smith 2016: 20–2). Broadly speaking, this is accomplished by beginning to think about how to proclaim Scripture, worship God, and love one another in ways that either delight or challenge anything that seeks to mask God’s delight. This, I think, will involve two separate but related activities: first, a reordering of the internal life of the church so that it inspires imaginations and habits that delight in God, creation, and our neighbours and, secondly, a willingness to challenge not only the ugliness found in the world – both social and ecological – but also those forms of worldly delights that dehumanize others or degrade the environment. And all this should be done, as far as it is practical, in ways that don’t reinforce the habits of consumerism, which focus Christian consumers primarily on achieving their own happiness and constructing their own identities. Practically, I think this involves exploring ways to express a Christian social imaginary that resonate with people’s hearts and imagination: art, music, architecture, story-telling, forms of liturgical worship, ritual, and ceremonial can all be means of expressing and allowing people to experience delight. As I write this in the midst of Advent in Wales, examples that spring to mind are hymns like ‘O come, o come, Emmanuel’ and ‘Come thou long expected Jesus’, and practices like lighting Advent Candles, the artful use of decorative greens, and the ever-popular Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols; these not only teach but also delight and therefore become objects of deep affection that draw people through the shared experience and understanding of preparing spiritually for Christmas. Mulled wine and mince pies don’t hurt either. Other examples throughout the year abound and can be used to provide congregations with regular opportunities to develop habits that root them in God, bind them together as a community, and connect

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them more firmly with creation. Finally, a priority must be for the church to begin forming its children in these stories and habits of delight, engaging them imaginatively with Scripture, allowing them to participate in the mature worship of the church, involving them in the care of others, and imbuing them with a love of nature and beauty. Churches should have long ago given up on trying to outentertain consumerism. Nurturing divine delights and challenging all that diminishes those delights is the inherent mission of the church and the only way people can be persuaded to choose God. In effect, the church exists as the means by which people find salvation through being delighted by God. Those communicated delights create and sustain a desire for God, which disposes or persuades Christians to make virtuous, moral choices that manifest God’s love. These choices are therefore not so much exercises of free will as responses to the delights that persuade people to move towards true freedom by being pleased by whatever pleases God. This process is cyclical: the received social imaginary of the church, rooted in the story of God’s redemption and enacted through sacramental worship and mutual affection, communicates the eloquent delight that draws us towards God. In turn, the experience of that delight in the company of a ‘peculiar people’ enkindles a desire to understand one another, the beauty we’ve encountered, and the God we worship. This desire to know what we love compels us to return thoughtfully to narratives and practices that express the eloquent wisdom we need to grow in understanding. God’s rhetoric, which drew us in the first place, once more scatters ‘charms and delight … with the intent of turning [us] towards what is good for [us]’ so that our fervent faith will seek understanding (OO 2.13.38). Focused attention towards the objects of delight (God, creation, and our fellow human beings) invariably enkindles (as love always does) a desire to understand them (as much as one can). And the process of seeking to understand such delights leads to greater delights as insights are gained: ‘It lifts us up out of ourselves, gives us a sense that we are, for once in our lives, really and properly seeing at least some bit of reality, and seeing it as it were “from on high”. For this and perhaps other reasons, it makes us (or it can make us) supremely happy’ (Chappell 2014: 302). Delight therefore gives way to contemplation, eloquence to wisdom, and restlessness to peace as we’re freed to recognize ‘something beyond ourselves,



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something we cannot control, something that imposes the discipline of external reality on the “fat relentless ego”’ (Chappell 2014: 304). And that fixed gaze on the other, especially God, transforms the community for the simple reason that we can’t long remain unmoved and unchanged by what we adore. So, yes, as Hauerwas and others argue, the church must be storyformed – it must tell its story to a world enslaved to a destructive rhetoric. But it must learn to do so with delight and by embodying that delight, through which people are transformed not by gaining knowledge or achieving moral perfection, but by coming into the presence of Love. Only in this way, can Christians confess the words of the Psalmist: ‘I find my delight in your commandments, because I love them’ (Ps. 199.47). Only in this way, can the people encounter the true freedom that draws them out of themselves into the ‘Lord’s own delight’ where they can ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Ps. 34.8). In the end, if the church’s mission (however active and eloquent) doesn’t arise from and incorporate the mystical, it is nothing at all. Or to put it another way, the goal of the church’s eloquence is ultimately to give way to silent adoration before the Beatific Vision. But in order to embark on this missio Dei, the church requires a ministry of delight: men and women who can be vehicles of God’s eloquence and delight.

7 God’s orators

The world was collapsing. Ever since the Roman military disaster at Adrianople in 378, Rome had been on its heels trying to cope with massive Gothic migrations. At about the time of the sack of Rome in 410, the Vandals, crossed the Rhine and pillaged their way down into the province of Hispania, reaching the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula in 425. Within a few short years, a vast swathe of the Empire had been lost to Gothic tribes and only the narrow Straits of Gibraltar separated the Vandals from the prosperous lands of North Africa, the bread basket of Rome. The Romans in Africa were in no condition to meet this threat. Their governor feared his political rivals in Rome more than the Vandals; in fact, according to one chronicler, the Vandals later crossed into Africa at his invitation (Burns, Jr. and Jensen 2014: 61–3). Threatened by the Vandals and undermined by Roman internecine conflicts, North Africa lay open to the Berber tribes on the fringes of the Sahara who seized the opportunity to extend their raids on the undefended plum Roman villas and towns. As usual, the Church wasn’t immune to the geopolitics that surrounded it. Division in the Empire was matched by discord in the Church. The churches in Africa had long struggled against the home-grown Donatist heresy. This had been followed by Augustine’s own debates with the Pelagians, and the effects of both these controversies would mark the Western church profoundly. Now, with the approach of the Arian Vandals, the Catholics stood at the cusp of their own marginalization and the loss of over three centuries of work in the towns and cities of North Africa. Once the Vandals conquered the province in the 430s, they imposed their Arian Christianity; not until the province was reconquered



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by Justinian during the sixth century was Catholic Christianity restored. When the Vandals reached the southern coast of Spain, Augustine of Hippo was approaching his seventy-first year. He would die five years later in the middle of the Vandal siege of his beloved city, which they captured and razed shortly thereafter. Behind him lay arguably the most illustrious episcopal career the Western church had ever known. By the standards of late Roman society – pagan and Christian – his production of written work had been prodigious, and he could take satisfaction in what he could leave to posterity. Not even Cicero himself could have boasted so vast a collection of letters, controversial works, public addresses, and treatises. If anyone ever embodied Cicero’s great orator (albeit in a Christian mode), it was Augustine. Given all that he had accomplished and the anxieties about the future, Augustine could have been forgiven had he decided to retire and end his days in quiet reflection. Old men have faced less dire prospects than he and still despaired about the future. That Augustine may have been tempted to become retrospective can be seen in his critical review of his own works in the strikingly entitled book The Retractions. But he didn’t have it in him to remain unengaged or retrospective for long. Instead, he decided to complete a book on rhetoric he’d begun thirty years earlier: On Christian Teaching. When he resumed writing On Christian Teaching, three of its books were complete, leaving only a final one unfinished. Augustine organized his book in a broadly standard fashion for handbooks on rhetoric, writing first about inventio and then elocutio. Books 1–3 develop his theory on inventio, or how to ‘discover’ effective arguments; book 4 would therefore address elocutio or how to deliver effective orations. On Christian Teaching is, therefore, a handbook on rhetoric to be read and studied, like any other rhetorical guides, by would-be orators. But unlike all the other handbooks in late antiquity, Augustine’s intended audience wasn’t those who were learning to speak or teach in the forum or law courts, but rather teachers and preachers responsible for instructing others in the teachings of the church. I think it tells us something about Augustine that amid a collapsing world he should return to his old master Cicero to suggest a rhetorical approach to Christian teaching for the future

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church. It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of On Christian Teaching on later education and ministry. As one scholar notes, ‘If Augustine ushered out antiquity, he at the same time ushered in a new civilization, established upon the complex relationship between two cultures, that of Greece and Rome, and that of Israel, reread by Christians, the new Israel’ (Strousma 2014: 70). While the world may have been moving inextricably towards the so-called Dark Ages, that future belonged to Augustine; thanks in part to On Christian Teaching, preaching and teaching would lay at the heart of a renewed energy to build God’s city amid the ruins of an ancient earthly one.

The new Dark Ages In 1981, Alisdair MacIntyre published After Virtue, now considered one of the most influential twentieth-century works of moral philosophy. Drawing on Aristotelian ethics, he argued that late modern society had lost the ability to engage in proper moral discourse because it had embraced emotivism, or the belief that ethical statements are merely expressions of approval or disapproval – to say something is right or wrong is simply another way of saying, ‘I approve’ or ‘I don’t approve’. According to MacIntyre, emotivism marks a radical break from the past and amounts to a rejection of virtue ethics, or the deliberate formation of people’s character into the moral tradition of their society. The pessimism of After Virtue is possibly even more striking than its argument. MacIntyre doesn’t see a practical solution to emotivism and so concludes his book on a somewhat despondent note: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium … we ought also to



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conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point… . And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time… . We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St Benedict. (MacIntyre 2011: 304–5) As this is quite literally the end of After Virtue, it’s difficult to say what exactly MacIntyre intended by this conclusion (though Hauerwas claims that he later regretted writing it) beyond offering an evocative image of places that can preserve the tradition of virtues as Benedict’s monastery preserved classical learning. Recently, the American conservative blogger Rod Dreher has taken up MacIntyre’s proposal by promoting what he calls the Benedict Option or BenOp. He argues that churches need to withdraw from the field of cultural battle, which they resoundingly lost, to become havens for preserving Christian virtues in an increasingly hostile world. Faced with an impending new Dark Ages, churches need to become like Benedict’s monasteries, intentionally governing themselves by Scripture and Benedict’s Rule, which (by his reading) helped to sustain Christian culture amid the societal collapse of the fifth and sixth centuries. He therefore suggests a ‘strategic withdrawal’ so that churches can begin to ‘develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them’ (Dreher 2017: 2). Dreher’s proposal has garnered a generous amount of commentary. R.R. Reno, for example, concludes that while there’s much useful advice in The Benedict Option, it ‘can read like Breitbart with incense’ (Reno 2017). According to Rowan Williams, The Benedict Option is unsettling. It confronts the prevailing consensus about how far the majority is willing to make room for principled dissent and public argument – yet at the same time shows a rather dispiriting lack of confidence in public argument. It puts a solid and appealing case for religious communities to be more serious about the disciplines that sustain prayer, compassion and integrity; but it is also a jeremiad against the

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decline of a certain sort of American public piety, and the sinister plans of relativists and revisionists. (Williams 2017) But perhaps Stanley Hauerwas’ assessment is the most damning: re-directing criticism normally aimed at his own theology, he suggests that even if the church should wish to withdraw into monastic seclusion, ‘there’s no place to withdraw to’ (Mommsen 2016). We’re surrounded – or, as I pointed out in the last chapter, the ramparts have already been taken and the so-called enemy is within the gates. Consumerism simply doesn’t allow space for BenOp, except perhaps as a commodifiable idea. While I don’t necessarily accept the alarmism about a new Dark Ages, I agree with MacIntyre and Dreher that the church likely finds itself at a turning point (at least in the West). Unless the church can reclaim its identity from consumerism, it will become little more than an organization for those who make Christianity a lifestyle choice. We’re likely at the threshold of a new world order when advances in life sciences, computing, and energy production revolutionize society. Given the direction and speed of these developments, the capacity for the market to lay claim to identities will expand exponentially in the coming century. Few churches have even begun to prepare for this. Whether the church likes it or not, it will have to confront this brave new world (as well as its ecological consequences). In that respect, I suppose, Dreher is correct. But his historically inaccurate picture of Benedict doesn’t provide a solution – Benedict’s monastery was only ever intended for those called to the secluded life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Instead, Christianity was preserved by a church confident enough to continue preaching, teaching, and publicly worshiping in a collapsing world. For the church to prosper again, it shouldn’t engage in a ‘strategic withdrawal’ but rediscover how to proclaim the gospel in fastchanging circumstances. In other words, rather than withdraw into monastic seclusion, expending their energies trying to become pure communities (and when has that ever turned out well?), churches should seek to become rhetorical communities that can contest the destructive rhetoric of our world. This mission requires Christian orators: preachers, teachers, and writers through whom God’s eloquent wisdom can draw people away from the rhetoric of market into the freedom of his own loving delight. Ultimately,



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what the church needs isn’t another Benedict; it needs another Augustine.

To instruct, delight, and persuade Before we meet Augustine’s Christian orator of On Christian Teaching, we must first deal with a problem: namely, that, according to Dodaro, Augustine rejected the possibility of any person assuming the role of Cicero’s wise orator. As discussed in the last chapter, Dodaro argues that Augustine believed that our fallen nature prevents us from ever being truly just and wise – the only person excellent and just enough to express wisdom eloquently is Christ himself. And the means by which his eloquent wisdom is expressed are Scripture and the saints. For the most part, Dodaro’s argument is persuasive. Augustine certainly did reject the possibility of actual orators successfully maintaining the commonwealth by their own efforts; ultimately, they’re all seduced by glory and, besides that, are too morally compromised in the first place to be truly wise. Both wisdom and eloquence, as we have seen, must come from elsewhere: namely, God. But then we have On Christian Teaching, written (in part) so that Augustine’s teacher can do exactly what Cicero’s orators do: use his wisdom and eloquence to promote whatever is beneficial to the community and defend against whatever is harmful (CT 4.2.3). In fact, Augustine even repeatedly refers to his teachers as ‘orators’ and argues that they should seek to be eloquent as well as wise. Did Augustine contradict himself? The answer to this apparent question is found in On Christian Teaching itself. Augustine doesn’t, in fact, argue for Christian teachers to become the equivalent of Cicero’s orator in a direct fashion. Instead he gives them a vital role to play as a means by which God expresses his own eloquent wisdom. Christian teachers aren’t the source of that wisdom and eloquence – that remains God – but they are formed and inspired to be people through whom God may teach, delight, and persuade the faithful to love him and their neighbours. In that sense, they’re sacramental: they and their words are the outward, sensible signs of God’s inward, invisible truth and delight. So, while they aren’t independent means by which God expresses his eloquent wisdom (submitting themselves to the

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eloquence of Scripture), they are important ones; indeed, because God doesn’t depend on them, their role as orators can only be seen as a gift or privilege. Let’s turn now to Augustine’s argument in On Christian Teaching. Earlier, I indicated that On Christian Teaching is divided into two unequal parts: an explanation of invention in books 1–3 and of style and delivery in book 4. ‘There are two things on which all interpretation of Scripture depends: the process of discovering what we need to learn, and the process of presenting what we have learnt. I shall discuss the process of discovery first, and then that of invention’ (CT 1.1.1). Gerald Press notes that Augustine here rejects the standard five-part rhetorical process (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) for the simpler twofold process of Aristotle and Cicero, which stressed invention as much as style (Press 1980: 119). While this is undoubtedly true, another way of considering On Christian Teaching is that books 1–3 concentrate on wisdom and book 4 on eloquence. Augustine’s handbook is therefore a ‘how-to’ guide for discovering and eloquently communicating God’s wisdom for the good of others. Augustine broke with Cicero, however, in how he defined the nature of invention. For Cicero, the first part of the rhetorical process consists of discovering ‘valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one’s case plausible’ (OI 1.7.9). He had the law courts or legislature in mind here, which led him to place the emphasis less on truth or teaching than on the skilful selection of effective arguments. Before you make your case, you need to know what you’re arguing and the best approach to take in persuading your audience. Augustine, however, was focused on the church rather than law courts, and therefore redefined invention as the discovery of divine wisdom in Scripture, which he further described as the twofold commandment to love God and neighbour: So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them. Anyone who derives from them an idea which is useful for supporting this love but fails to say what the writer demonstrably meant in the passage has not made a fatal error, and certainly is not a liar. (CT 1.36.40)



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Books 2 and 3 then provide a complex and detailed discussion of hermeneutics to explain how the teacher can best understand Scripture in order to build up ‘this double love’. The aim of scriptural study is therefore to discover the wisdom to teach others. In that sense, for Augustine wisdom and love are apiece, and we can understand why if we keep the City of God in mind. Building up the community into the love of God and neighbour is to form it in that love which makes the heavenly city distinct from the earthly: the love of God rather than the love of self. The goal isn’t so much theological or scriptural knowledge (as we understand it) as the discernment of the ‘common objects of love’ that can be properly pursued and enjoyed. Scripture leads Christians to that end – it’s the only way for someone to learn how to ‘love God to the contempt of the self’. That love, rather than scriptural knowledge, is the goal. In fact, Augustine is happy to claim that ‘a person strengthened by faith, hope, and love, and who steadfastly holds to them, has no need of scripture except to instruct others’ (CT 1.39.43). The instruction of others, however, must be conducted persuasively. In addressing how to do this at the start of book 4, Augustine returns to Ciceronian territory. Rejecting the argument that Christians should discard rhetoric (based as it was on pagan learning), he asserts that because rhetoric is used to give conviction to both truth and falsehood, who could dare to maintain that truth, which depends on us for its defence, should stand unarmed in the fight against falsehood? This would mean that those who are trying to give conviction to their falsehoods would know how to use an introduction to make their listeners favourable, interested, and receptive, while we would not; that they would expound falsehoods in descriptions that are succinct, lucid, and convincing, while we would expound truth in such a way as to bore our listeners, cloud their understanding, and stifle their desire to believe; that they would assail the truth and advocate falsehood with fallacious arguments, while we would be too feeble either to defend what is true or refute what is false; that they, pushing and propelling their listeners minds towards error, would speak so as to inspire fear, sadness, and elation, and issue passionate exhortations, while we, in the name of truth, can only idle along sounding dull and indifferent. (CT 4.2.3)

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While Cicero might have sniffed at Augustine’s talk of truth and falsehood, he would have recognized the fundamental theory: the best way to defend against the destructive charm of demagogues is to defeat them rhetorically. The battle is won through rhetorical rather than martial feats. That eloquence, however, must be entirely in service to wisdom. Augustine has little time for rhetorical flourish for its own sake and none at all for the kind of oratorical performance that seeks only praise – the popular form of rhetoric of his own day. The effectiveness of eloquence, however plain or ornamented it may be, is therefore determined solely by how well it expresses God’s wisdom to the ignorant. So, just as scriptural knowledge is useless unless it builds up others in the love of God and neighbour so too is even the most ornate eloquence if it fails to communicate love. ‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’ (Rom. 13.1). Eloquence remains essential, however, because it imparts the spiritual delight needed by sinful people to attend to God’s wisdom and receive it to their own benefit. Although that delight can be found in Scripture, Augustine is enough of a realist to acknowledge that many need additional help to discover it because of their moral blindness. The church therefore requires eloquent expounders of Scripture: Eloquent speakers give pleasure, wise ones salvation… . We often have to take bitter medicines, and we must always avoid sweet things that are dangerous: but what better than sweet things that give health, or medicines that are sweet? The more we are attracted by sweetness, the easier it is for medicine to do its healing work. So there are men of the church who have interpreted God’s eloquent utterances not only with wisdom but with eloquence as well. (CT 4.5.8) In short, delight has the capacity to overcome human ignorance and moral weakness to draw sinners to the wisdom by which they’re saved. To neglect such delight in teaching is to make Scripture inaccessible to all but ‘a few enthusiasts, who are eager to know the things they need to learn no matter how dull and unattractive the teaching may be’ (CT 4.11.26). At this point Augustine turns directly to Cicero: ‘It has been said by a man of eloquence … that the eloquent should speak in such a



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way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners’ (CT 4.12.27, quoting O 69). He explains that Cicero is stating that while the key thing is instruction, eloquence facilitates understanding. To teach in a way that delights and persuades is to communicate, and the success of any communication is determined by how well the listeners understand. So, orators should communicate in a way that best disposes the listeners to accept what’s being taught. We can hear a faint echo of the question raised by Cicero at the start of On Invention: What use is wisdom if it’s mute? What’s the point of communicating if people can’t attend to what’s being delivered? Therefore, eloquence is a necessary part of instruction: A hearer must be delighted so that he can be gripped and made to listen, and moved so that he can be impelled to action. Your hearer is delighted if you speak agreeably, and moved if he values what you promise, fears what you threaten, hates what you condemn, embraces what you commend, and rues and thing which you insist he must regret, and pities those whom by your words you present to his mind’s eye as miserable, and shuns those whom with terrifying language you urge him to avoid. (CT 4.12.27) Notice that effectiveness of the teacher is the same as for Cicero’s orator or, for that matter, the devil: the capacity to instruct, delight, and persuade. Thus, the diabolical power to enslave humanity through suggestion, delight, and consent is met, in part, by the teacher’s power to instruct, delight, and persuade people towards God’s saving wisdom. In both cases, the essential thing is to gain the listener’s assent, to make it impossible to choose other than as the orator wills. Thus, Augustine concludes, ‘When advocating something to be acted on the Christian orator should not only teach his listeners so as to impart instruction, and delight them so as to hold their attention, but also move them so as to conquer their minds’ (CT 4.13.30). At this point, there’s very little in On Christian Teaching to indicate that the character of the Christian orator differs much from that of Cicero’s orator. Augustine has suggested that wouldbe preachers must have good moral fibre and apply themselves to wisdom and eloquence; that’s effectively Cicero’s orator. Yes, that wisdom is Scripture rather than law and philosophy and, yes, that eloquence is different from the highly stylized rhetoric of Cicero.

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But so far Augustine has indicated that both can only be achieved through study, imitation, and practice. There’s very little in general terms with which Cicero would have found fault. But then Augustine says something extraordinary that, at first glance, seems to undermine his entire argument: He should be in no doubt that any ability he has and however much he has derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory; and so, by praying for himself and for those he is about to address, he must become a man of prayer before becoming a man of words. As the hour of his address approaches, before he opens his thrusting lips he should lift his thirsting soul to God so that he may utter what he has drunk and pour out what has filled him… . So let the person who wishes both to know and to teach learn everything that he needs to teach, and to acquire the skills in speaking appropriate to a Christian orator; but nearer the time of his actual address let him consider that there is more suitable advice for a holy mind in what the Lord says: ‘Do not worry about what to say or how to say it; for you will be given words to speak when the time comes. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks within you.’ If the Holy Spirit speaks in those who are delivered to their persecutors for Christ’s sake, why should he not speak in those who deliver Christ to their pupils? (CT 4.15.52) Augustine can’t resist a pun. Orator comes from the Latin verb oro, orare, which means ‘one who prays’. An Orator can therefore refer to one who prays or to one who speaks publicly – Augustine combines the two definitions by arguing that the one who speaks must first be one who prays. And he does so to make a point: despite all that he has said about obtaining wisdom and eloquence, it’s ultimately Christ who speaks through the Christian orator by the outpouring of the Spirit. Inspiration rather than application allows him to utter the divine wisdom he has drunk. True oratory is a form of prayer: speakers who wish to teach, delight, and persuade should, therefore, ‘pray that God will place a good sermon on their lips’ (CT 4.30.63). What then of the diligent studying he has encouraged throughout the rest of the book? Is none of that ultimately important? Recall



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the discussion in Chapter 4 of this book of the conundrum faced by classical philosophy: namely, how to perceive whatever transcends the five senses. That philosophy distinguished sharply between knowledge (scientia) and wisdom (sapientia). Knowledge pertained to the information and know-how any person can obtain through study or the five senses. Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from God; it’s an understanding of things, a vision of a reality that includes heaven and earth, that for Augustine comes only through grace. Such wisdom doesn’t depend on human knowledge (God can grant it to anyone), but human knowledge prepares people to use divine wisdom for the benefit of others. In that sense, the study of Scripture and rhetoric becomes something like a spiritual discipline that enables the mind to be used more effectively by God for the building up of others through his eloquent wisdom. Augustine’s Christian orator is, therefore, a remarkable figure. He (and we would, of course, now say she) is someone who must excel in three areas. First, the orator must be a person who diligently studies Scripture and other helpful subjects to discover the wisdom to teach others how better to love God and neighbour. While such study requires a supple mind that can tackle the obscurities and figurative language of Scripture, at least there’s the reassurance that as long as one teaches others how to love properly then it doesn’t matter too much if the interpretation isn’t strictly accurate (CT 1.36.41). In short, the orator needs to know what he or she is going to teach and why. Second, the Christian orator should be a person who knows how to communicate eloquently. While it’s perfectly possible that some people will delight in the truth taught without additional help, most people need to be drawn to that knowledge through the delightfulness of its presentation. This requires the orator not only to study and practice how to communicate well, but also to know the intended audience well enough to decide on the most effective approach to take. He or she should understand how to fix the attention of the audience on the truths being taught and then how to convey those truths persuasively enough to dispose them towards assenting to them. In other words, the Christian orator must know how to engage hearts as well as minds. Finally, and most importantly, the Christian orator must be a person of prayer. It’s only by prayer that she or he will gain understanding and wisdom and only by prayer that he or she will

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be filled with God’s love and delight. The intent of this prayer is to become one through whom Christ can speak and the Spirit delight. Prayer provides the orator with the wisdom and delight for building up others in God’s love. In this way, preaching, teaching, and writing are for the Christian orator forms of intercessory prayer, and like all such prayer requires both the humility and love to be attentive to the real needs of others. The Christian orator, therefore, is a prayer who teaches, delights, and persuades. He or she shares in God’s great oratory, participating in his rhetorical performance that contests the destructive rhetoric of the devil and draws men and women to their freedom in Christ. One might think of this role as a rhetorical sacrament since it embodies sensibly God’s eloquent wisdom. It’s through the orator’s mind and voice that God delivers his wisdom and eloquence; it’s through the orator’s prayer and love that people encounter the spiritual delight that reshapes their identity and grants them a freedom that comes only through love of God and neighbour. Throughout is God’s grace, empowering, encouraging, sustaining, and transforming both speaker and hearer – and, Augustine is keen to add, drawing everyone together into ever greater delight.

Christian teaching in the City of God It’s important not to lose sight of the City of God when considering Augustine’s Christian orator. In many ways, On Christian Teaching is a handbook for how Christ’s just society (to use Dodaro’s phrase) is sustained in part through the ministry of Christian orators. While they’re only conduits of God’s own eloquent wisdom, it’s through their teaching and preaching that the citizens of the heavenly city encounter truth and learn to delight in it. They are a vital part of how the city of God draws the faithful towards their common objects of love, which characterizes them as the community that pursues the ‘love of God carried as far as contempt of self’. This isn’t done simply by teaching or informing the church community about how it ought to live or what it ought to believe. More fundamentally, Christians are persuaded to desire God and therefore to conduct their lives in ways that manifest their love of God and neighbour. And such is the power of rhetorical delight that the satisfaction of this desire affords pleasure; they pursue God because that’s what



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pleases them most. Minds are certainly informed but, more crucially for Augustine, hearts are inflamed. Nor does this high view of Christian orators contradict Dodaro’s argument that Augustine identified Christ alone as the source of eloquent wisdom that’s delivered sacramentally through Scripture and the saints. On Christian Teaching presents the work of Christian orators as entirely dependent on the eloquent wisdom of Scripture and the example of the saints. In the middle of defending the benefit of rhetorical study in book 4, Augustine states: ‘For when I understand these authors [of the books of the bible], not only can I conceive of nothing wiser; I can conceive of nothing more eloquent’ (CT 4.6.9). The wisdom and eloquence of the Christian orators are never separate from Scripture’s own eloquence and wisdom – their ancillary rhetoric never seeks to do other than present the wisdom and delight that’s already found in Scripture: ‘And the effect of that eloquence [in Scripture] on a person of good character is not so much to instruct when painstakingly discussed as to inspire when passionately delivered. For such things were not produced by human labour, but poured from the divine mind with both wisdom and eloquence’ (CT 4.7.21). Moreover, effective Christian orators model themselves on the saints: if would-be teachers wish to know how best to fulfil their responsibility, better for them to look to the saints than to rhetorical handbooks. ‘Let us look at these styles in writers who by their reading of scripture attained a knowledge of the divine truths of salvation and made it available to the church’ (CT 4.21.45). This gives Augustine an excuse to provide a technical analysis of the eloquence of three saints – Paul, Cyprian, and Ambrose – to demonstrate that saints such as they manifest the peculiar nature of Christian oratory. They’re the models of true oratory. They’re to the city of God what Cicero’s great men were to the Roman republic: excellent examples of moral rectitude, wisdom, and eloquence. Unlike Cicero’s great orators, however, their hallmark isn’t glory but humility because they know their excellence is entirely Christ’s own. On Christian Teaching presents an astonishingly high view of the Christian ministry. Those who would be Christian orators need to be of good character and capable of both discerning God’s wisdom through their close study of Scripture and communicating that wisdom eloquently. More than any of these, they need to be

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people of prayer, who can humbly turn towards God so that their knowledge and speech can be transformed into God’s wisdom and eloquence for the edifying of the church into his love. Nowhere in On Christian Teaching does Augustine limit this vocation to the priesthood – in fact, his repeated use of the term ‘orator’ suggests that he considered the Christian teacher – whether ordained or not  – to be one of the highest callings within the church. What might that mean for the ministry in the twenty-first century?

A ministry of wisdom and delight I’ll answer that question in relation to the previous chapter’s discussion about what it means to be a community and how this shapes what we mean by mission. In doing so, I wish to avoid two mistakes in interpreting On Christian Teaching. The first is to understand Scripture solely in terms of the Old and New Testaments themselves, as though what’s crucial for our own equivalent of Augustine’s Christian orators is that they know the Bible backwards and forwards. Updating Augustine’s advice isn’t achieved by ensuring that all would-be teachers have earned advanced degrees in biblical studies! Rather, Scripture is situated at the heart of the social imaginary and tradition that have grown from and express it. In other words, the wisdom is primarily a manner of perceiving reality that’s rooted in Scripture and builds up people in the love of God and neighbour. In that sense, part of the work of Christian orators today is enculturation – enabling people to feel at home within God’s city. If the first mistake is to define Scripture too narrowly, the second is to define Augustine’s teacher too narrowly and individualistically. While I would happily support people involved in the teaching ministry of the church – youth workers, leaders of study groups, religious educators, and even seminary faculty – reflecting on Augustine’s rhetorical theology in order to learn something from it, I believe the implications of his approach pertain to the ministry as a whole. While not all people are capable of both wisdom and eloquence, all can make eloquent teaching part of their aim, an ideal towards which they strive. What do I mean by all this? As we saw in the last chapter, for the church to engage meaningfully in its mission within our present



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context it must become an intentional rhetorical community whose social imaginary and practices persuade Christian men and women to desire and pursue the love of God. God’s wisdom and eloquence are properly encountered within that community through Scripture, worship, prayer, preaching, teaching, fellowship, and service. Through all these activities, the church community promotes love of God and neighbour. But a rhetorical community doesn’t exist or endure as such without a rhetorical ministry. For the church visibly to be the city of God it must have orators who can continually return Christians to the sources of its wisdom and delight. It needs men and women who can teach, delight, and persuade people to discover among God’s people the delights that will cause them to grow together in God’s love. Yes, this does require a ministry of teaching. I can think of little that’s more urgent than for the church to undertake the formation of the baptized into the stories, practices, beliefs, and habits of the church. Too many Christians are aliens to their own commonwealth, having long been failed by an institutional church that downplays the need for such teaching. Teaching, however, needs to be something that characterizes every aspect of a church’s life. Formation isn’t just (or even primarily) information but rather the rooting of hearts, minds, and bodies in the imaginary, habits, and practices of the church. When people worship, they are learning; when they pray, they are learning; when they serve others, they are learning. They need constantly to be reminded, however, that these activities aren’t extraneous to their beliefs but are forming them to be the kind of people who can love God and neighbour in a world that seeks to persuade them to love themselves. If good works are the fruits of a lively faith, then our true beliefs and identity are what arise from both. And what of delight? The role of Christian orators is certainly not to entertain since such techniques reinforce the habits of consumerism. In fact, we must begin by teaching Christians about delight itself, by which I mean the simple act of enjoying the other for its own sake. As we’ve seen, there’s no getting around the fact that we’re all to one degree or another enslaved to the delights of the market. We want to shop, we want to be stimulated and entertained, and we want to enjoy the freedom to choose whatever life we’ve been led to believe fulfils us and is authentic for us. We all to one degree or another depend on those delights that the market

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offers and are therefore profitable. We must therefore begin by simply offering opportunities for people to be still and attentive, and to delight in good things for their own sake. The easiest places to begin, I suspect, are learning to delight in human fellowship and nature. Fostering strong communities of mutual affection and connecting those communities with the actual world that God created are probably a necessary start for growing together in the delight of God. What attracts people to the church is their experience of the love shared within a Christian community. ‘“Look”, they say, “how these Christians love one another,”’ exclaimed Tertullian. I think Augustine would have been happy to give that exclamation a sharper edge: ‘Look how these Christians delight in one another.’ Everything that churches do should encourage such mutual delight, and this requires a ministry that teaches their communities to take seriously the business of delighting. But this community of mutual affection shouldn’t stand apart from creation. The great dis-embedding from the natural world that’s characterized by our frantic development of ways to impose our will on nature even as we spend more of our time in a virtual one is antithetical to the gospel. The beauty of creation – indeed, Augustine says, its very existence – is a manifestation of God’s own beauty and goodness. The delights of that creation are traces of ‘the source of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and wholly blissful delight’ (T 6.12). Among the more salient features of the church as the city of God should be its deep and abiding stewardship of creation. ‘Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen’ (1 Jn. 4.20): I see no reason why this warning shouldn’t also include (to borrow the imagery of St Francis) Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Fire, and Sister Mother Earth. All of which takes us back to prayer. The ministry of teaching, which roots people in the social imaginary and habits of God’s city by persuading them through delight to desire the love of God and neighbour, should be seen in terms less of function than of prayer. The processes of instructing, delighting, and persuading are three aspects of prayer for those called to be Christian orators. Like all prayer, persuasive teaching is offered up to God in humility. It’s only by grace that anyone can teach, delight, and persuade since one can never hope to be anything more than effective conduits of God’s



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own eloquent wisdom. It’s partly through such active prayer that the Holy Spirit is outpoured and the hearts of the faithful are filled with the love of God. In the end, what will save the churches mired in consumer culture isn’t a Pelagian rolling up of the sleeves until we’ve ‘built Jerusalem’ in any ‘green and pleasant land’, but the prayerful reception of God’s own eloquent wisdom for the benefit of others. Finally, because the church is a community that participates in God’s redemptive rhetoric, its ministry can never be inward-looking. The Benedict Option is no option for a church called to share in that redemptive rhetoric. Perhaps the church could try to withdraw if God had chosen to save us through a redemptive philosophy, a kind of Gnostic inward turn to discover the spark of divinity within each of us. Instead, he called the church to be a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’, by proclaiming the gospel and contesting the destructive rhetoric of this fallen world. Ultimately, as with Cicero’s orators, the only place for the church is in the forum, teaching, delighting, and persuading people to become citizens of God’s eternal city.

Augustine for the present and the future As we’ve seen throughout this book, the church finds itself at crossroads. For too long, Christianity in the West has been happy to be mainly a lifestyle choice, and the church an organization that enables such people to gather, work together, and worship. Meanwhile, the world has been dominated by the rhetorical community of the market that powerfully and continually shapes people’s identities, sense of freedom, and notions of happiness. It does this, in part, by manipulating our sources of delight, convincing us through pervasive and invasive marketing to pursue whatever is financially profitable. Within consumerism, marketing functions like Cicero’s oratory – it’s through the public discourse of mass marketers and advertisers that the community is sustained and held together as a community. But the rhetorical community of the market isn’t sustainable – the levels of consumption required to generate the illusion of free choice can’t be maintained – and so this rhetoric is ultimately built upon a falsehood. Like Rome and any manifestation of the earthly city, it must all one day come crashing down.

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Instead of retreating into splendid isolation, the church is called to be in the midst of this earthly city, proclaiming the gospel and teaching people to love both God and neighbour. The church is characterized by this love; therefore, by its very existence it demonstrates to the world an alternative manner of living. But the rhetoric of the earthly city is so shaping people’s delights and desires that they’re disposed to desire and choose its loves over God’s. They’ve been persuaded by consumerism to pursue their own thisworldly happiness through the purchase of goods and services and to form their own identity through that process of consumption. Thus, the church requires its own eloquence to announce the wisdom of God in ways that will grab people’s attention and make them receptive to his salvific truth. Fundamentally, wisdom and delight should be found in the church itself. When consumers encounter the church, they should experience in the very life of that church a wisdom and delight that’s unlike anything they’ve found elsewhere. That wisdom and delight should support them in the dilemma of being faithful in a fallen world, rooting them in a life that feeds their desires with spiritual delights. This certainly includes the hearing and study of Scripture, engaging in prayer and worship, and the reception of the sacraments, but also participating in the fellowship of the church and learning to forsake the self through loving service to others. Finally, churches will know that they’re building up the community in the right kinds of delight because their loves will not only magnify God and neighbour but also be in harmony with creation. To achieve this grand vision requires a ministry of wisdom and delight. The church desperately needs to explore ways of forming men and women to be eloquent teachers who can help guide churches to become places of wisdom and delight. These teachers must be prayerful people who can understand God’s wisdom and communicate it eloquently. In short, they must be capable of instructing, delighting, and persuading people to become part of the  church which teaches, delights, and persuades them to love God and neighbour. By continually offering this rhetoric to God, the church’s orators serve also as prayers. Perhaps they should be prophets too, announcing persuasively to our world the destructive ends towards which it’s leading us. I suspect some will be disappointed that I’ve not clearly laid out more precisely what it means for the church and her ministry to



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express wisdom and delight. But a shopping list of spiritual delights or a ‘how-to’ guide for delighting in God would be too prescriptive and too much like something the market provides: Here’s how to delight in God or your money back. Delight and wisdom must be discovered, explored, and ultimately tested by their fruits – how they present themselves are beyond number, though I suspect the ancients were right in describing them all as true, beautiful, and good. But Augustine was exactly right when he said that as long as others are built up into the love of God and neighbour, we shouldn’t be too alarmed if what we teach or do isn’t entirely correct – God’s love and grace cover a multitude of sins. With that assurance in mind, my chief hope at the conclusion of this book is that you’ve been inspired enough to consider how to help nurture your church as a community of delight. But if that’s an unsatisfactory way to end this book, then I think we can give Augustine’s hero, St Paul, the final word. To be a rhetorical community of God’s wisdom and delight ultimately is to be a place where people learn to enjoy for its own sake: Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you. (Phil. 4.8-9) Ultimately, that’s the purpose of mission and ministry for Augustine and what makes his rhetorical theology, like the Beauty he worshiped, both ancient and new.

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INDEX

actions  7, 10–11, 25, 30, 44–5, 63–4, 71, 76, 94, 109 Adam and Eve  35, 118 advertisements  1–5, 10–11, 14, 17, 41–2, 45–7, 50–9, 87. See also marketing Africa, North  23–4 allegory  35, 80, 111 Ambrose  32, 137 Apple  3, 6, 53, 56, 57 Aristotle  112, 126, 130 ascent, contemplative  64–8. See also reditus Augustine and Cicero  24, 25, 27, 28, 36, 48, 60, 68, 69, 76, 98–9, 117–18, 125, 129–30, 132–4 conversion  24, 32–5, 63, 65, 75 early career  24–7 early life  23–4 education  23–4 episcopacy  24, 35 and rhetoric  23–4, 25, 26, 31, 125–6, 129–38 works 8  76–7 CF  24, 25, 28, 31, 32–6, 37, 63, 65–7, 69, 71–2 CG  77–8 CT  19, 54, 125–6, 129–36, 137–8

EP  71 FC  74 GRM  70–1 HEJ  64 HGJ  69 L  65, 69, 74 LSM  35–7, 39 M  71, 73–4 OM  37–8 OO  67–8, 122 S  37, 70, 73, 78–9 SL  80 T  37, 69–70, 140 TCG  101, 107, 115, 118–21, 131, 136–8, 140 TS  38–40, 75 Bach, Johann Sebastian  64, 65 Bauman, Zygmunt  4, 12–13, 14, 46–7, 52–3, 96 beauty  69, 70, 72, 77–8, 122, 140, 143 Benedict of Nursia  127–9, 141 Benedict Option (BenOp)  127–9 Bernays, Edward  3, 54 Berry, Wendell  44–5 bodies  43–4, 64–5, 68, 111–12, 139 bondage  18, 27, 34–6, 50, 59–60, 64, 69, 72, 76–8, 80–1, 98–9, 100, 107–8, 120

152 INDEX

brands  2–6, 10–11, 14, 46, 53, 55–7, 105 Brexit  9 Brown, Peter  23, 25, 28 Carthage  23–4 Catiline  25, 27 Cavanaugh, William  14 celebrities  23, 58 choice  4–5, 10–11, 14, 16, 39–40, 42–5, 48, 52–4, 58–60, 80, 81, 86, 89–90, 92, 95–7, 106, 111–13, 115, 116–17, 120, 122, 128, 133, 139, 142 Church  18, 55, 85, 86, 87, 91, 93, 99, 132 and consumerism  17, 18–19, 97–8, 99, 100–1, 141 as a rhetorical community  19, 101, 105–23, 128–9, 136, 138–9, 141, 142–3 in Dark Ages  127–8 dilemma  14–16, 88 of England  17 in North Africa  124 Cicero  17, 35, 36, 60, 115, 125, 132 influence  24, 25, 26, 27–8 life  27 rhetorical theory  17, 19, 28–32, 33, 37, 38, 45–8, 64, 67, 69, 78, 98, 117, 118, 129, 130, 131, 132–4, 137, 141 works Hortensius  24 The Ideal Orator  26, 28, 29–30 On Invention  26, 28–9, 68, 76, 117, 118 Orator  26, 28, 30–1, 38

Coca-Cola  4, 5–6, 10–11, 53–4, 57, 96 commonwealth  28–30, 115–19, 120, 129, 139. See also Republic, Roman communication  11–12, 54–5, 72, 115–19, 121–2, 130, 132–3, 135, 142 communion  73, 75, 100, 115, 119 community  19, 29, 41–2, 82, 86, 87, 88, 93, 98, 129, 131, 136, 138, 140 rhetorical  19, 48, 59–60, 86–7, 96–7, 100, 105–23, 139–43 conscience  75, 78, 84, 98, 100 consent  9, 27, 30–2, 34–7, 39, 48–59, 76–81, 96–7, 98–9, 120, 133 consumerism  10–14, 15–17, 18, 40, 41–4, 82, 85, 94, 95–6, 105–6, 117, 121–2, 128, 139 as a rhetorical community  45–60, 86–7, 96–101, 107–8, 141 as worldview  89–90, 94, 97 contemplation  16, 64–8, 69, 108, 122 corporations  2–4, 13, 17, 57 creation  19, 64, 66, 70–2, 107, 121–2, 140, 142 creed  32, 33, 66, 74, 97 Dark Ages  126–9 delight  17, 19, 28, 31–2, 48, 54–7, 67–8, 94, 95–7, 98–9, 129–30, 133–6, 151 Cicero’s view of  31, 132–3 communities of  17, 99–101, 107–8, 116–23, 136, 139–43

INDEX153

and freedom  14, 17, 39–40, 43, 50, 58–60, 75, 76–82, 86, 117, 122, 128, 139 Holy Spirit as  18, 19, 64, 69–70, 72, 73–5, 77, 78, 80, 81, 99, 119 identity  38–40, 43, 86, 120–1 illicit/worldly/sinful  18, 27, 33–37, 40, 49, 71–2, 75, 77, 80–1, 120–1 nature of  37–40, 69–71 rhetorics of  17–19, 99–101, 120–1 spiritual  34, 40, 49, 63–4, 69–73, 77–8, 81, 100, 120, 132, 136, 142–3 demagogues  26, 31–2, 36, 37, 72 Demosthenes  25 desire  1, 4–5, 11, 18, 19,31, 35, 41, 42–3, 44, 46–8, 49, 52–3, 57, 58–9, 63–4, 65, 76–8, 80–1, 85, 87, 89, 94–101 passim, 108, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 122, 136, 139, 140, 142 Devil  18, 27, 34, 36, 40, 49–50, 52, 69–72, 79–81, 107–8, 118–20, 133, 136 dilemma 14–5, 18, 34, 60, 63, 78, 81–2, 83–121, 142 discourse, social  3, 108, 115–21, 141 Disney  1, 3, 13 doctrine  32, 34–5, 93, 97, 106 Dodaro, Robert  19, 117–18, 129, 136, 137 Donatists  124 Dreher, Rod  127–9 education  23–4, 25–6, 27, 55, 126 elocutio  125, 130

eloquence  25, 26, 34, 35, 38, 46, 50, 67–8, 69, 81, 118, 120 and the Church’s mission  107–8, 119, 138–42 Cicero’s definition  24, 25, 26–32, 117, 118 and delight  31, 64, 75, 78, 100, 119–20, 123 and the Holy Spirit  18, 19, 64, 69, 72, 73–4, 75, 78, 81, 100 versus wisdom  26, 28–30, 31, 67–9, 118, 119, 122–3, 129–36, 137–9 emotions. See pathos enculturation  93, 138 Enlightenment, The  6, 11, 42, 88–9, 91 entertainment, mass  42, 55, 96–7 Evangelicalism  83–4, 85, 88, 105 Facebook  9–10, 14, 55 Fall, The  35–6, 76, 80, 118 fiction, medium of  8–9, 12, 52, 108 Francis, Saint  140 freedom  1–19 passim, 34, 25, 38–44 passim, 48, 50, 52, 58–60, 65, 75–81 passim, 86, 89, 96, 98–9, 101, 106, 107–8, 113, 115, 117, 122, 123, 128, 136, 139, 141 of choice  11, 59 Freud, Sigmund  7 Good Life, The  1–2, 5, 11, 14, 42–5, 53, 57, 68, 89, 94, 96, 100 grace  19, 76–8, 99, 100, 119, 135, 136, 140, 143 Grayling, A. C.  41–5, 48, 53, 59, 92

154 INDEX

Habinek, Thomas  30 habit  15, 19, 29, 33–4, 36–7, 51, 58–9, 69, 76, 81, 85, 86, 97, 99, 111–14, 117, 119, 120, 121–2, 139–40 habitus  112–13 handbooks, rhetorical  28, 125, 137 happiness  1–2, 4–5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16–19, 24, 27, 43, 44, 46–7, 53, 59, 73, 89, 95–9, 108, 119, 121, 122, 141, 142 Harrison, Carol  74 Hauerwas, Stanley  88, 98, 106–7, 123, 127, 128 heaven, heavens  49, 64–7, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 84, 135 hell  37, 39, 49, 115 Hercules  42–5, 89, 92 Holy Spirit  18, 19, 64, 69–75, 77–8, 80–2, 99, 119, 134, 141 humility  66, 119, 136, 137, 140 identity  1–6, 12, 15–19, 27, 35, 39, 40, 43–4, 46–8, 58–60, 85–7, 89, 90, 93, 95, 99, 100–1, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112–13, 115, 120–1, 128, 136, 139, 141–2 imagination  3–5, 8, 10, 19, 52, 89, 107, 110–14, 121–2. See also myth, social imaginary ‘inform, engage, delight’  48–60 Internet  3, 5, 10, 51, 55, 58, 85, 86, 87, 113 inventio  125, 130–1 Isocrates  25 Israel  66–7, 126

Jesus  35, 66, 74–5, 76–7, 81, 84, 90, 93, 105, 112, 117–19, 121, 129, 134, 136, 137 Kenney, John Peter  67 knowledge (scientia)  3, 10, 28–9, 30, 46, 63, 64–5, 67, 68, 74, 76–7, 93–4, 96, 98–9, 111–12, 115, 123, 131, 132, 135, 137–8 Kolbet, Paul  68 language  3, 11, 41–2, 117–18, 135 Laudato si  15–16 law  23–4, 29, 63, 76–8, 79–80, 94, 95–6 Le Bon, Gustov  7–8, 10 lifestyle  11, 15, 16, 86–7, 106, 120, 128, 141 Lindströ m, Martin  5–6, 14, 57 Lippmann, Walter  8–9, 10, 12, 52 Logic. See logos logos  31 love  18, 32–3, 37–8, 64, 65–6, 69–70, 72–5, 77–81, 92–3, 100, 107–8, 111–12, 114–23, 129–31, 132, 135–6, 138–43 Luther, Martin  63 McAllister, Denise  84 MacIntyre, Alisdair  126–7, 128 Maffesoli, Michel  11–12 Manichaeism  32, 65 marketing  10, 13, 17, 41, 43–4, 94, 105. See also advertising and the good life  1–5, 10, 16, 17, 47, 95, 96, 99

INDEX155

and identity  13–14, 16, 18, 43–4, 59–60, 86, 95, 128–9 lifestyle  1–5, 17 as oratory  10–11, 14, 19, 45–60, 97, 99–100, 106–7, 141 pervasive  2–3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 19, 47–8, 55, 56–7, 85–6, 96, 141 religious quality of  14, 105 as social discourse  3 media mass  8–9, 47, 55, 83–4 social  3, 5, 9–10, 13, 51, 54–5, 57, 58, 83, 85, 86 memory  33, 35–6, 65, 68, 130 Microsoft  3, 4 Midgley, Mary  110 Milan  24, 32 Miles, Steven  14 Millennials  105 Miller, Vincent  16, 94–5 ministry  19, 82, 101, 123, 125–6, 136–7, 138–43 mission  15, 17–19, 82, 90, 101, 106–8, 119–23, 128, 138–9, 143 Mission-shaped Church  17 modernity  6, 88–91 Monica  66–7 Muth, David  84 myth  42, 59, 92, 110–11, 114. See also imaginary, social Cicero’s  28–9, 68–9, 75, 117, 118 narratives  52–5, 56, 67, 88, 90, 92–3, 95, 97, 98, 101, 107, 110–11, 116, 118–19, 121, 122, 127, 129–33, 135, 137–9, 142

nature  6, 59, 122, 140 nature human  49, 50, 129 second  111, 112–13 neuroscience  5–6, 10, 11 obligations  52–3, 60, 98 O’Donovan, Oliver  10, 55, 115–16 orators Christian  128–40 duties of  30–1 marketers as  46–8, 97, 141 oratory. See rhetoric, eloquence Ostia  66–7 pathos  2, 4, 11, 25–6, 31, 34, 53–4, 58, 81, 95 Pepsi challenge  5–6, 8, 10–11, 38, 53–4, 57, 96 Persuasion. See rhetoric Pew Forum  105 philosophers  23, 24, 26, 32, 42, 64–5, 67, 68 attitudes towards rhetoric  25, 26, 28 philosophy  24, 28, 64–5, 67–9, 117, 126, 133, 135, 141 Neoplatonic  64–8 Piper, John  83–4, 85 Plato  64 pleasure  25, 27, 33, 35, 36, 39, 42–3, 45, 47, 49–50, 57, 68, 72, 77, 79, 84, 85, 96, 132, 136–7 Plotinus  64 pornography  85 practices, social  13, 15, 19, 88–9, 92–3, 97, 105, 106–7, 109–14, 116–17, 119, 120, 121, 122, 139 prayer  19, 49, 100, 127, 134, 135–6, 138, 140–1, 142

156 INDEX

preaching  19, 125–6, 128, 129–36, 139 pride  49, 65, 68–9, 75, 119 producers  41, 50 Protestantism  105, 106 psychology  7–8 of sin  27–37 publicity  55 public vs. private  16, 85–6 reality  5–10, 12–14, 44, 47–8, 52, 57, 84, 88–94, 101, 107, 188–9, 111, 114, 115–17, 119–20, 122–3, 135, 138 redemption  27, 32–5, 37, 48–9, 64–8, 76–8, 80–1, 94, 98, 99, 101, 106–8, 120, 122, 132, 137 reditus  65. See also ascent, contemplative religion  14, 42, 43, 46, 59, 97 Reno, R. R.  127 republic, Roman  26–8, 30, 45, 47, 137 rhetoric  112–14, 130–2, 129–38 education in  23 marketing as  10–14, 17, 43, 45–60, 86–7, 94, 106, 107 and mission  17, 19, 106–8, 119–23, 128–9, 138–43 purpose of  11, 30–1 and redemption  32–40, 63–4, 67, 71–2, 77–82, 95–101, 115–18 Roman  23–6, 27–32, 45–6, 125, 130 and theology (see theology, rhetorical) versus philosophy  25–6, 28–30, 67–8 Rome  24, 45, 107, 124, 126, 141

sacraments  19, 100, 118, 122, 129, 137, 142 saints  19, 100, 118, 122, 129, 137, 142 salvation. See redemption Satan. See devil Scripture  88, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 107, 118–19, 121, 122, 127, 129–33, 135, 137–9, 142 sex trafficking  59 sexualisation  59 shopping  1–2, 4, 13, 41–2, 43, 46, 52–3, 54, 57, 58–9, 86, 87, 96–7, 105, 112, 113, 139 Siapera, Eugenia  47 signs  115–17, 118, 129 Simplicianus  38, 75 sin  17–18, 27, 33–7, 40, 49, 63–4, 71–2, 75, 76–81, 83–4, 94, 96, 99, 117–18 slavery  40, 59, 63, 69, 77, 79–80, 123, 133, 139 smartphones  3, 4, 13, 57, 59, 85 Smith, James K. A. 19, 92–3, 97, 111–14, 121 social discourse  108, 116–19, 120–1, 141 social imaginary  109–10, 114, 116–19, 120–2, 138–40 social psychology  7–9, 44, 108 society  6, 9, 44, 49, 93, 99, 106, 109–10, 117–19, 126, 128, 136 consumer  4, 11–12, 14, 17, 41–2, 43, 45–8, 50, 52, 53, 57, 59–60, 85–90, 95, 115, 119 (see also consumerism) Roman  23, 25, 29, 114–15, 125

INDEX157

sophistry  26 soul  33, 37–8, 64–5, 67–8, 71, 75, 81, 117, 134 Starbucks  53, 57 Star Wars  12 suggestion  35–7, 39, 49, 50–1, 52–3, 58, 60, 78–81, 99, 120, 133 Symmachus  24

Vandals  124–5 Victorinus, Marius  68, 74 violence  25, 49, 83, 114–15, 119–20 virtue  1, 25, 29–30, 45, 46, 73, 81, 88, 107, 118, 126–7 Visigoths  107 Vivian, Bradford  11–12

Taylor, Charles  19, 109–10 teaching  19, 68, 75, 78, 80, 95–6, 98, 99, 125–6, 128, 130–6, 138–41, 142 teenagers  3, 13, 23 Tertullian  140 TeSelle, Eugene  80 Thagaste  23 theology  14, 17, 26, 63, 81, 128 rhetorical  27, 34, 39, 64, 68–9, 72–5, 82, 95, 99 138, 143 tradition  89–90, 110, 116, 126–7, 138 tribes consumer  12–15, 95, 96 rhetorical (see communities, rhetorical) Trinity  69–71, 73–5 Trump, Donald  9–10

Weltanshauung. See world views will  17, 25, 26, 30, 31–2, 34–38 passim, 49, 64, 68 bondage of  18, 34–7, 39–40 divided  18, 32–4, 75, 83–103 Williams, Rowan  127–8 Willimon, William H.  106–7 wisdom (sapientia)  25, 42, 65, 66–7, 73–4, 110, 118, 130–1 and delight  19, 74–5, 77–8, 137, 138–41, 142–3 and eloquence  18, 28–9, 67–9, 74, 117–20, 122, 128, 129–36, 137–8 and knowledge  64, 135 worldviews  18, 87–95, 97–8, 100, 101, 109, 111 worship  3, 19, 93, 97, 98, 105, 121–2, 128, 139, 141, 142

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