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Odious Praise: Rhetoric, Religion, and Social Thought , by Eric MacPhail

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jhistrhetoric.26.3.0406

2687-8011

Vanessa Lim,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Eric MacPhail’s Odious Praise: Rhetoric, Religion, and Social Thought offers a fascinating account of a particular species of epideictic oratory, a form of praise that is “odious” in the sense that it or its implications are not straightforwardly laudatory. The inaugural example of this form is the encomium written (allegedly) in praise of the legendary Egyptian king Busiris by the sophist Polycrates, a work we know of only through Isocrates’s own oration about the same king. In his Busiris, Isocrates denounces Polycrates’s encomium as morally and rhetorically confused, for it praises the king in such a way that he appears much worse than he would have had he been vituperated instead, thus casting odium not only on the subject of praise but also on the writer and the very art of praise itself. In Odious Praise, MacPhail traces the genealogy, purposes, and uses of this ironic and fluid rhetorical form not simply in the domain of rhetoric but also (as its subtitle suggests) in relation to religion and social thought. Odious praise, MacPhail argues, is situated in “an adversarial relationship to collective identity” and can serve as “a tool of analysis and an antidote to all forms of chauvinism” (5). If even a universally reviled deed (such as Busiris’s brutally cannibalistic act of killing his guests and eating them) can be praised, then we might wish to reflect further on the values we hold and how they may come into conflict with the values held by others.In tracing this rhetorical form, the book undertakes a sweeping analysis of “the tension between competing value systems within Renaissance culture and the role of epideictic in fomenting this tension” (7). To that end, MacPhail classifies Renaissance values into three broad categories that correspond to the book’s three chapters. The first of these is Platonic values, which rate “speech over writing, spontaneity over premeditation, truth over rhetoric” (38). These came to be so emblematically represented by the conflict between Socrates and the sophists that in the Renaissance “to praise the sophists or to blame Socrates can only be odious praise” (7). MacPhail reads this theme in and through a range of texts, such as Girolamo Cardano’s De Socratis studio (first published in 1566) and Sperone Speroni’s undated Discorso dei lodatori (a short excerpt of which is helpfully included as an appendix at the end of the book). While Speroni and Cardano invert the Platonic value system, in his Essais (1580–88) Michel de Montaigne “presents himself as the new and improved Socrates, who revives the Socratic method in order to challenge the new teachers, the humanists, who reprise the role played by the sophists in classical antiquity” (29).The next chapter turns to what MacPhail identifies as Ciceronian values, which are “challenged and affirmed through the praise of language” (7). MacPhail finds in Cicero’s De finibus a defense of the parity of Latin and Greek, a topic later taken up with enthusiasm by Renaissance commentators under the name of Ciceronianism. Following his Roman model, Angelo Poliziano undertakes a praise of poverty when he affirms Latin over Greek in the first chapter of his Miscellaneorum centuria prima (1489), and, in Poliziano’s praise of illaudatus Cicero, the Roman orator can be said to assign “equal value to rhetoric and philosophy, to truth and eloquence” in a rejection of the Platonic values examined earlier (43). In response to the Ciceronianism of the period, Erasmus then takes this further with his concept of illaudatus Christus: since the Ciceronians are “reputed to banish all Christian terminology from their lexicon and to hate the very name of Christ,” Erasmus comes “to what might otherwise seem the superfluous defense of the Son of God” (45). MacPhail offers here an illuminating reading of Erasmus’s Dialogus ciceronianus (1528), which engagingly captures its arguments and the response to its publication and then further develops the chapter by turning to Joachim Du Bellay’s defense of French (from 1549 or later). Like Cicero, Du Bellay defends a vernacular against a prestigious classical language, but this attempt cannot be said to be particularly impressive: the more Du Bellay defends French, “the worse it appears,” making of its language and its native literary tradition “a new Busiris” (63).Church values—or, more precisely, the clash between them and humanistic values—take center stage in the next chapter, which shows how Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola, and Erasmus “react against the hegemony of scholastic theology and its peculiar deformation of the Latin language” by exploiting “the most insidious resources of odious praise” (65). MacPhail shows how Valla’s speech in praise of Thomas Aquinas (delivered in 1457) is designed to invert well-established topoi about Aquinas so as to “undermine the shared values of its audience” (66). Implicit in Valla’s “impertinent” (66) praise of Aquinas is the notion that the scholastics are, in fact, the enemies of religion for importing philosophy into theology and that rhetoric is, instead, “of great service and ornament to divine matters” (70). These themes are picked up by Pico in a letter to the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro dated 1485, a text that eventually became known as De genere dicendi philosophorum. Imagining a speech delivered by the scholastics in self-defense against the humanists, Pico praises philosophy in such a way that “his immediate audience understands him to exalt the power of rhetoric and to challenge the institutions of church and university that he purports to uphold” (73). In turn, the Pico-Barbaro correspondence might be a precedent for Erasmus’s Moriae encomium (1511), which exacerbates the clash of values between humanism and scholasticism.The book delivers most fully on its subtitle’s promise to explore religion and social thought in its final chapter, which opens by returning to Busiris, in which Isocrates also writes admiringly of the Egyptian religion’s effectiveness as a tool for social control. This, MacPhail suggests, would have been especially striking for Renaissance readers since it “may have encouraged a new way of looking at religion as a social institution rather than a revealed truth” (84). While commentators such as Hieronymus Wolf (who translated and edited Isocrates for a Renaissance audience) were wary of this view, other writers such as Machiavelli were keen to explore the political utility of religion. Machiavelli’s Discorsi (1531), however, follows not Isocrates but Polybius in seeing religion as an institution for cultivating stability and coherence in expansionist states, using this insight to analyze how it is “an organic factor in the life cycle of republics” (87). While Machiavelli lauds the role religion plays in maintaining power, political order, and military discipline, he at once empties it of all value in his illustrative examples, in which religion serves no spiritual function and is, instead, a tool used by rulers to keep the ruled in check. The praise of religion in the Discorsi, then, can be said to offer “a very lucid critique of what it praises” (90). “Before the development of the social sciences as a university discipline,” MacPhail suggests, the explanation of religion (such as the one offered in the Discorsi) is “the task of epideictic” (93), and odious praise thus becomes a precursor to social science avant la lettre. This chapter also reads two well-known responses to Machiavelli—Innocent Gentillet’s Discours (or Anti-Machiavel; 1576) and Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la République (1576)—before closing with another look at Montaigne’s Essais. Montaigne’s analysis of religion is similarly functional and is also one that expresses an admiration for the “salutary imposture of religion”: it “may be a hoax, but it works better than conscience ever did to make people do their duty” (105).The genealogy of the rhetorical form traced in Odious Praise is both persuasive and perceptive, and MacPhail offers a characteristically erudite and illuminating account of both well-known and comparatively unfamiliar works. Though the texts the book discusses can feel a little eclectic at times, Odious Praise offers an extremely valuable and important account of this rhetorical mode and its paradoxes. Odious praise, MacPhail notes in the conclusion, is “identified by its surprising and disconcerting impact on the reader” (111), and the book is especially deft at outlining how and why it produces this effect in a wide range of contexts and debates. In some respects, the book itself can also be read as a subtle laudatio of this rhetorical mode, which MacPhail suggests is a “kind of therapy for human judgment”: it can “enhance our faculty of human judgment and supplant more traditional forms of education or instruction” or “further the educational program of rhetorical humanism by advertising the power of speech and of artfully constructed argument” (111). It can even be said to do what Socrates was praised and blamed for, namely, “[bringing] our thoughts down to earth to dwell on our social relations and institutions” (112). Not all readers will be persuaded by this praise or the place that MacPhail claims for this rhetorical mode as a precursor to social thought. On the whole, however, like the odious praise it examines, the book unsettles our understanding of epideictic and its values in a productive and generative manner, and for that it should be most straightforwardly praised.