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The Role of Rhetoric in the Early Church Fathers
Rhetoric is taxonomic art and how exciting that is. The more you split a subject down, the more likely it is you will be expert in handling all aspects of that subject. Augustine's rather braver. He sees rhetoric as a rousing memories of what you already know. Your knowledge of God is already there inside you. And rhetoric is an appropriately passionate thing to rouse the memory of that. It's a neoplatonic way of thinking. In addition, he looks at the Bible and says, this is something which is part of our classical heritage. It's not a savage text, a barbaric text. It shows the sorts of schemes and tropes that we have come