Rhetoric, Evil, and Privation: From Augustine to the “Persecuting Society”

Abstract

As is well known, the twelfth century marks the advent of a new “symbolist mentality” in the Christian West, spearheaded in large part by the Platonists of the School of Chartres and the Abbey of St. Victor.¹ Inspired by the Latin auctores and a partial knowledge of Plato’s Timaeus, the Chartrians were instrumental in reviving interest in the rational study of visible phenomena and the rhetorical, mythographical, and poetic implications of a Timaean cosmology. According to authors like Bernard Sylvester, Alan of Lille, and John of Hanville, scientific observation and allegorical poetry provide readers with experiential and intuitional knowledge about the divine ordering of the universe and in so doing allow the mind to ascend from divine immanence toward divine transcendence, from the natural toward the supernatural. Figuration, especially of nature or the cosmos, serves the purposes of wisdom and understanding by providing access to the inner reality of things as well as the sublime reality of essences. For their part, the Victorine scholars largely eschewed secular poetry and accorded only a limited value to a theologia mundana. They preferred instead an intuitionist, anagogical, and mystical approach to biblical exegesis and cosmic sacramentalism. The Victorines were nevertheless fascinated with the process whereby sacred symbols and observable nature could take on conceptual and ethical significance in response to divine illumination.

Li mauvés ne sunt pas home. [The wicked are not men.]

—Reson in Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose, line 6292

If, indeed, the well-being of the whole body demands the amputation of a limb, say in the case where one limb is gangrenous and threatens to infect the others, the treatment to be commended is amputation. Now every individual is as it were a part of the whole. Therefore if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good.

—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2–2.64.2