New wine into old wine skins: on the christian recovery of classical argumentation

Abstract

With the advent of Christianity began a complex stage for the development of rhetoric and, particularly, for the development of an essential part of the speech: the argumentatio. The preaching of the Gospel was involved early in a problem of transmission that generated a huge controversy about the role of art in preaching the word of God, as opposed to the nude faith in the Holy Spirit action. This controversy not only refined the fertile distinction between res and verba that would constitute a prescriptive topic until the Renaissance, but also brought about the weakening of the probative function of the example, while its ornamental function was strengthened, since the causes that Christianity defended preferred argumentation by ethos rather than any demonstration. For this reason, the medieval recovery of the inductive argumentation was marked by two essential circumstances for the later development of rhetoric and, in general, of all wisdom literature: the proliferation of examples of a fictional nature and the compilation practice of the same ones, that came to transcend its rhetorical function towards the constitution of a complete way of understanding the world, the human been and the history.