Seton Hall University

From the SelectedWorks of Jon P. Radwan

Spring 2012

Contact Rhetoric: Bodies and in Deus Caritas Est Jon P. Radwan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/jon_radwan/43/ Contact Rhetoric: Bodies and Love in Deus Caritas Est

Jon Radwan

A close textual analysis of Benedict XVI’s inaugural Deus Caritas Est— is Love is off ered from the perspective of Platonic and contemporary rhetorical theory. An acclaimed inspirational success, this letter proposes loving “encounter” and “response” as the fundamental dynamic of Christian communication; God is “felt” and made manifest in concrete love-of-neighbor. Benedict’s “contact” orientation has significant implications for contemporary theory—humanity becomes ontologically contiguous, subjects are holistically embodied, Truth is grounded in co-felt exchange, and discourse is decentered by direct public engagement. Deus Caritas Est draws attention to ethical limits in Dramatism and Logology and advances embodied, invitational, and theological perspectives on rhetorical theory by showing how genuine love initiates and feeds a divine dynamic that can transcend divisions and unite humanity.

. . . all speech, which is the means the have given man to express his soul, is a form of . . . . With that truth the rhetorician will always be brought face to face as soon as he ventures beyond the consideration of mere artifice and device. Richard Weaver

Love is free; it is not practiced as a way of achieving other ends. . . . God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love. Benedict XVI

Jon Radwan is Associate Professor of Communication at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.

© 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 15, No. 1, 2012, pp. 41–94. ISSN 1094-8392.

41 This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 15:1, Spring 2012, published by Michigan State University Press. 42 Rhetoric & Public Affairs

n early April 2005 religious leaders and heads of state worldwide joined 1.1 billion Catholics in mourning the passing of one of the most beloved Iin history. Over his nearly three decades in office, John Paul II’s influence was unprecedented, even in comparison with the myriad accomplishments of two thousand years of successive pontiff s. Because his unusually long reign coincided with and successfully engaged the global media explosion of the late twentieth century, John Paul II’s ideas on key religious and political issues such as Christian , Marian devotion, the rights and dignity of labor, the limits of communism and Marxism, the complex relationship between war and justice, and the urgent need for a coherent of the body, all had enormous reach and impact.3 How could anyone step into the shoes of such a leader? Th e world watched anxiously and by mid-April the had elected a successor. Joseph Ratzinger left his role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and became Benedict XVI, the 265th heir to the throne of Peter. In January 2006 the Vatican promulgated Benedict’s first major doctrinal message, his encyclical letter entitled Deus Caritas Est—God Is Love. As with any inaugural address from a world leader, Benedict’s first encyclical was received not simply as doctrine, but also as a formal announcement of first principles that would set a tone and suggest a trajectory for his term of office. For months following its release, Benedict’s “love letter” generated a great deal of attention in the press and an overwhelmingly positive response from the Church community and religious commentators, including former and non-Catholics.4 A learned, lucid, and direct call to understand and practice Christian love, Deus Caritas Est is a fascinating and powerful text that achieves a rare balance between education and inspiration, instruction and love. One profession that is slow to notice the release of papal , even major ones, is rhetorical studies.5 Th is is not deliberate inattention but rather an aspect of a modernist academic culture in which, since the Enlightenment, religion has gradually been set apart from the scientific and philosophic mainstream. Oft en religion is classed as a private rather than a public aff air, despite a proliferation of religious rhetoric overtly addressing mass audiences on moral issues that directly underpin social policies and decision making.6 Earlier in Western history, the relationship between rhetoric and religion shift ed and ranged much more widely. Sometimes the two traditions were allied, as when St. Augustine brought together pagan and secular rhetorical perspectives to enrich and enlighten Christian preaching and ,

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yet in other eras the fields were clearly at odds, as when the Sophists taught young Greeks to challenge tradition and question the gods.7 Still today, few religious leaders will deny the art of rhetoric an instrumental function in sharing and spreading their faith, yet the humanistic trajectory seemingly inherent in a rhetorical approach—socially constructed realities and myriad changing intersubjective truths—is anathema to believers in revealed truth and divine law. Deus Caritas Est represents Benedict’s entry into this turbulent and contested zone reaching between rhetoric and religion, reason and faith, truth and belief, and his point is as simple and compelling as it was for —God is “felt” and made manifest in love-of-neighbor. With today’s postmodern turn in critical theory, the Enlightenment rationality that marginalized God has lost its unquestioned preeminence within both the academy and Western culture at large, and one important result has been a renewed interest in religion and faith-based perspectives.8 In the field of Communication this move is seen most clearly in the development of research outlets like the Journal of Media and Religion or the Rhetoric and Religion book series from Baylor University Press.9 In reviewing the range of scholarship within this trend, Jeff rey Kurtz concludes that despite diverse perspectives,

surely we might agree on this: Questions about the nexus of religion and public aff airs, faith and learning, never have been more urgent, particularly when the answers at which we might arrive could serve to shape how we understand and practice matters of rhetorical deliberation—deliberation that might be injected with and inspired by something more potent than . . . the “pure secularism” that has become the sine qua non of our so-called post-modern age?10

Th is essay aims at exploring this suprarational potency and power of religious rhetoric that eludes relativistic secular modes of appeal. Benedict and the Christian tradition employ what I term a “contact orientation” to communication and persuasion, and in so doing demonstrate limits in discursive approaches to rationality and rhetorical subjectivity. Religion inspires and persuades “whole” people, heart and mind, body and soul, and thus has rhetorical warmth, validity, and force that the discredited logics of modern social theory actively avoided in their pursuit of scientistic objectivity. A contact orientation diff ers from discursive rhetorical theory by positioning physical contact and touch between people, rather than individual

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use of language, as the archetypal locus of meaning.11 Th is is not to say that language and abstractions lack meaning and rhetorical import; it is to say that symbol systems are an advanced and specialized form of much more basic and shared “embodied” modes of communication, and that rhetoric is best understood via careful attention to physical patterns of engagement underpinning symbolic choices. Within the Platonic tradition this idea is explored in terms of rhetorical Eros, and in the Burkean tradition it is termed “embodied rhetoric” or “dancing an attitude.”12 Th e advantage of a contact perspective is its ability to coherently relate love and rhetoric, grounding symbolic action in interpersonal, as opposed to civic, ethics and directing attention to our physical, as opposed to logological, modes of transcendence and unification. Following a review of approaches to love in rhetorical theory, a basis for “contact” as a key term is developed out of ’s and Richard Weaver’s work on Eros and Kenneth Burke’s ideas on attitude, dance, and embodiment. Next, Benedict XVI is introduced as an influential religious leader. His acclaimed first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, translated into over a dozen languages and addressed to all 1.1 billion Catholics worldwide, is analyzed in terms of three research questions. Two concrete critical questions are simply “What mode of contact does Benedict advocate?” and “How does he do it?” Th e third question is broader: “How can Benedict’s contact mode, Christian Loving, inform contemporary rhetorical theory?” Finally, contemporary theory is revisited in terms of contact in general and love in particular. Th e main points advanced here are that symbolism presupposes and rests upon physically embodied patterns of engagement, and that the most genuinely rhetorical engagements, communication in both its creative and persuasive senses, are ultimately the most loving. Benedict’s appeal can only be understood by grounding rhetorical and media theory in a contact ontology.

Love in Platonic and Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

In the classical period a fusion of rhetoric and love forms the foundation for Platonic rhetorical theory. On the banks of the Ilissus, Socrates and Phaedrus come to understand how the base orator manipulating listeners is a sycophant who debases both himself and his audience as he eschews knowledge and conforms to popular beliefs and opinions. Via rhetoric orator

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and audience become united, and if the goal is popular success then the orator must become what his public wants him to be; he is a slave to convention.13 In contrast the noble orator is a true lover. Rhetoric is just as present in interpersonal conversation as in civic debate, and in engaging the other as a beloved soul rather than a gathering of opponents or potential dupes, the orator’s goal becomes the True and the Good rather than the merely expedient or useful. For Plato the Good is discovered through dialectic, where critical discussion with others is the only path leading to knowledge that transcends appearances and fashionable opinions. Because one the Good and solo theorizing necessarily yields limited perspective, others must be shown the way of dialectic, nurturing their rational and discursive talents so that, together, the discussants can work their way closer to divine goodness, truth, and beauty.14 Plato tempers the abstraction of his idealism by humanizing this entire process in clear sexual and reproductive terms, an erotic and thoroughly embodied relationship where the rhetor “plants the seeds” of divine inspiration in auditors’ souls, enabling and helping them to grow closer to the Good as the seed matures and flowers. As this love is passed on, subsequent generations of progeny are likewise inspired to pursue truth and justice via discourse.15 Despite Plato’s compelling argument for identity between noble rhetoric and true love, much subsequent critical theory does not engage the inter- personal dimension of communication.16 Generally the Western rhetorical tradition follows Aristotle and Cicero, where the focus is on individual faculties practically and strategically directed outward to maximize legal or political efficacy, not cooperative development of souls.17 It is difficult to find a place for love in such an agonistic schema.18 At best Erotic rhetoric is replaced by a depersonalized civic , such as Quintilian’s good man speaking well, where the focus is on developing one’s own ethics and talent to help guide the state. At worst love is in the same circumstance as Plato found it, manipulated and preyed upon by sophistic trickery or crushed by Machiavellian power plays. Accordingly, interpersonal love is a rare topic in contemporary rhetorical theory.19 Today, Plato is much better known for his earlier work condemning sophistry than for his later dialogues divinizing noble discourse. A major exception to this trend, and one of our few modern Platonists, was Richard M. Weaver. His work on ethical rhetoric, and in particular his reading of the function of Eros in the Phaedrus, enables an approach that stresses “the congruence of rhetoric with the soul” and brings all communication

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under the auspice of love.20 Th e argument begins with the logical priority of dialectic; it is obvious that orators must understand their topics before recommending their views. A dialectical conversation aims at establishing truth about doubtful propositions, and when the propositions bear on public aff airs, as all of the important ones do, they must do so in the form of policies of choice and avoidance, the very content of rhetoric.21 Policies are courses of action, and this move brings us into the realm of ethics and the soul. For Plato and Weaver the soul is immortal yet temporal, ever wending its way into the future, with education, compatriots, and culture influencing one’s overall stylistic pattern or habitual tendency of action.

[T]erms of tendency—goodness, justice, divinity, and the like—are terms of motion and therefore may be said to comport with the soul’s essence. Th e soul’s perception of goodness, justice, and divinity will depend upon its proper tendency, while at the same time contacts with these in discourse confirm and direct that tendency. eTh education of the soul is not a process of bringing it into correspondence with a physical structure like the external world, but rather a process of rightly aff ecting its motion. By this conception, a soul which is rightly aff ected calls that good which is good; but a soul which is wrongly turned calls that good which is evil.22

Th us in Weaver and Plato we see how the noble orator, in loving the good, seeks to move and “turn” along with it by directing action into an overall pattern that matches, as much as is humanly possible, the divine motion of the universe. Regular contacts with others taking this turn reinforce and guide social intercourse into a pattern harmonizing truth (knowledge) and justice (action). Th ere are three other contemporary writers on love and rhetoric, and each takes a diff erent tack; neo-Platonic, emergent, and ironic. Th e first two, Wayne Brockriede (1972) and Jim Corder (1985), present constitutive theories, whereas Joshua Gunn (2008) approaches rhetoric as an instrument. Brockriede’s “Arguers as Lovers” is the most well-known article in this area. His call for attention to actual people arguing and the ethics of exchange parallels Plato and Weaver’s concern for the soul.23 Drawing upon Henry Johnstone and Maurice Nantanson’s description of genuine argument as constitutive self-risk, where the process and outcomes of meaningful discussions potentially change the very identity and personal being of both parties, Brockriede uses the rhetorical subjectivities available in sexual

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relationships to classify argumentative stances.24 In this schema arguers may treat one another as rapists, seducers, or lovers. Th e rapist attempts a unilateral relation, treating the other as object to be manipulated or victim to be violated, and this is achieved through strong-arm tactics like censorship or deliberate silencing. Where rapists are direct and forceful, seducers aim at “tricked assent” via charm and deception.25 With the seducer, the Other is strategically relieved of decision-making power via arguments that skew perception of the relevant values and conditions. In contrast to these two argumentative stances, Brockriede’s lover represents the ideal philosopher or scientist. Here the strategies involve open presentation of propositions and rational review from equals. Th e arguer-lover understands self-risk and, when presented with a compelling and valid argument, opens the possibility of revising his position and thus himself. For lovers the ideal is more the mutual development and growth of dialectic rather than the dominance or success-oriented goals of agonistic rhetoric. Unlike the bold physicality of Brockriede’s stances, Corder’s emergent approach to rhetoric and love is more discursively oriented. Here each of us is the author or narrator of our lives, and when the worlds and lives we construct compete for the same time and space, we “emerge” toward the other as arguments. Th is is a constitutive perspective on discourse, where people are the stories they tell and no rhetorical tactic is distinguishable from the ethos of the speaker.

[A]rgument is not something to present or to display. It is something to be. It is what we are. . . . We are the argument over against another. Another is the argument over against us. We live in, through, around, and against arguments. To display or to present them is to pretend a disengagement that we cannot actually achieve and probably should not want to achieve. Argument is not display or presentation, for our engagement in it, or identity with it, will out.26

Following Carl Rogers and his idea of genuine listening as vital and therapeutic, Corder makes several recommendations on how our narratives should ideally emerge and reach toward the other. Abandoning authoritative positions, learning to argue provisionally, truly understanding both the other and oneself, and above all working so that conflicting narratives can occupy the same time and space can all teach us to “love before we disagree.”27 If we are to move past the tragic history of conflict built into the traditional conceptions of argument, we must turn rhetoric into love via “generative

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ethos” and a “commodious language,” a discursive style and way of being that creates a world capable of holding and supporting diverse points of view. Brockriede and Corder are both constitutive theorists, but they diff er in their approach to rhetorical subjectivity. Corder’s rhetor is essentially alone in his narrative world and takes full responsibility for creating conditions that allow two arguments to “break into mutuality,”28 whereas Brockriede’s arguers are completely relational and co-constitute one another over the course of their exchange. Th e choice between these two subjectivities, actor as opposed to co-actor, is a basic tension in rhetorical theory, with most traditional theory favoring some form of “act” as the key term. In the next section Gunn’s critique of the Burkean actor demonstrates a need for a relational verb, “contact,” in understanding rhetoric as love.

Identify? Invite? “Con-tact” as Key Term in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

In his 2008 article “For the Love of Rhetoric, with Continual Reference to Kenny and Dolly,” Joshua Gunn advances but ultimately does not accept an argument against mainstream rhetorical theory, claiming that the conception of the subject embedded in Burke’s now widely accepted terms “identification, division, and consubstantiality” is preventing our field’s understanding of rhetoric as love.29 Burke’s (and Lacan’s, and most Westerners’ since the Enlightenment) idea of humans as essentially distinct subjects all symbolically striving for consubstantiality is questioned because, for them, communion and identity between parties can never truly be achieved. In this analysis the identification-division dualism at the heart of contemporary theory renders all appeals to consubstantiality as lies, promising something they will never be able to deliver; rhetoric conceived in the Burkean tradition is thus a drama of deceits.30 Gunn’s, and arguably Burke’s, response to this dilemma is to adopt an ironic and comedic attitude because despite necessary deception, there are occasionally some lies that are beautiful and even revolutionary.

Recognizing deceit as the aff ective basis of persuasion, however, does not mean that rhetoric is unnecessary or that we can avoid—or even would want to avoid—our bad love. A false promise does not equate to a false . . . . [C]ommunication as shared meaning and love as unification are homologous and impossible. Embracing rhetoric’s love is akin to stupidly singing “Islands

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in the Stream,” full-throated and passionately, at the local karaoke bar. Even deceit can bring us much joy, for it is the logic of what many term “fun.” Sometimes rhetoric’s love produces a better smelling deodorizer. And sometimes the speech of stupid fools and idiotic lovers changes the world.31

Gunn’s decision to welcome deceit, holding onto the solo subject and ironically relishing the pungent fun of rhetoric’s bad love, is analogous to a knowing and happy dance with Socrates’ base (or at best the neutral) lover; true lovers and their shared dialectical path toward truth simply do not exist in this schema.32 In knowing that the Other is always both idiotic and lying, and yet still heartily singing along, taking joy in shared delusion because that’s all there is, communication itself becomes little more than mutual seduction and fantasy, sometimes beautiful and frequently eff ective but never real or true. If readers can grant the first half of Gunn’s point, that adopting “identify” as the key verb in persuasion condemns Burkean and most contemporary rhetorical theory to compensating for insurmountable division with lies, but are not content with defining all communication and love as seduction, then what is left ? He tentatively suggests (but is not prepared to accept) a potential answer in a revised “positive” ontology inspired by radical feminism’s charge that any attempt to change another is interpersonal violence. In making an ethical relationship the goal of the exchange, rather than persuasive conquest, Sonya Foss and Cindy Griffin’s “invitational” rhetoric successfully rejects the agonism of the rhetorical tradition, but then limits itself in assuming the traditional cogito, independent subjects working across a gulf between parties.33 In extending her invitation, however ethically, the rhetor acknowledges and demonstrates her inherent division from her audience.34 Th e revision required here is an equally radical rejection of division, a new rhetorical ontology based on “pre-symbolic unity.” From this perspective, symbols themselves introduce division from lived experience; they are strategic re-presentations always addressed to the Other. Gunn draws on Oliver, Davis, Irigiray, and others to suggest “an ontology of true love based on a non-representational consubstantiality. . . . a conception of subjectivity that is neither lacking nor alienated but rather fundamentally connected.”35 Th at is, instead of assum- ing a collection of independent subjects acting symbolically in their own self-interest, one should see each as mutually constituted in their bonding, a rhetorical ontology based on networks of interdependent contact. Radical rejection of division opens a new landscape for rhetorical theory, but Burke’s body of work is far too rich to dismiss as another hyper-modernist

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dualism obsessed with symbolic negation. Dropping “identification-division” is not the same as dropping Burke. In the mid-to-late twentieth century Dra- matism and Logology appealed to the growing field of Speech Communication because they explored and legitimated oratory as a paradigmatic mode of social intercourse and language as a primary medium. Other important avenues in Burke, such as embodied rhetoric or theological perspective, received less attention and represent a useful place to turn in seeking a contiguous ontology to round out a theory of contact rhetoric. In 1961 Burke published his analysis of Christian terminology, Th e Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Th e book concludes with a “Parable of Purpose,” a fascinating dialogue in Heaven between Th e Lord and Satan where God explains to his favorite pupil how human motivation functions. With this book on Logology, on words about words and in particular words about Th e Word, it is revolutionary that Burke (the rhetorician par excellence, writing in the voice of God) locates the root of rhetoric and basis of human interaction not in Speech but in Dance—coopera- tive, physical, expressive, meaningful, mute.

Th e Lord. Indeed, always beneath the dance of words there will be the dance of bodies, the mimetic symbol-system that all these animals will come close to having in common, though their sedentary ways of living will cause them to forget it, like persons who, moving into a diff erent part of the world when they were still quite young, come in time to forget the language of their child- hood, the language most profoundly persuasive of all. But talk of the dance, and its body-language, brings us to exactly the next step in our unfolding. Satan. And that is, milord? . . . Th e Lord. Th e nature of language as petition, exhortation, persuasion and dissuasion implies that, first of all, their words will be modes of posture, act, attitude, gesture. If one of their creatures strikes an attitude, such as kneeling in obeisance, that’s real enough—and the same kind of reality can be carried into any words that go with it. . . . But in any case, whether in error or not, the attitude will be wholly real while it prevails. Satan. Th eir task in ranging linguistically, then, will be to round out their sheer attitudinizings as thoroughly as possible? Th e Lord. Yes, and some quite grandiosely architectonic enterprises will emerge in the process. And because some of the earth-creatures will be able to range far in such activity, all of them will be able to range somewhat. Satan. Th eir most comprehensive symbol-systems, then, will be but a constant striking of attitudes?

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Th e Lord. Yes—and thus, ultimately, a striking of attitudes towards the Great What-Is-It. Satan. And, aft er all, that’s us! Th e Lord. Indeed it is! (pause)36

Th is dialogue places attitudes toward others and the divine, shared modes of posture, act, and gesture in the face of mystery and wonder, at the center of rhetorical theory. Language off ers only subsequent development of our much more basic and shared substrate, the “dance of bodies” where human reality is enacted. Here discursive formations are spun from mingled sweat. From a contact perspective the dance is never solo and always social, with more or less established or coordinated patterns of communicative grip and release. Moreover, Burke’s attitudinal “strike” becomes an apt and powerful verb for expression because it connotes much more than any mere pose: it highlights the corporeal truth of physical force, as in striking a foe or two beloveds stroking.37 Th is brief summary of how Love has been taken up in Platonic and contemporary rhetorical theory demonstrates a need for a relational verb, a term that casts division as more linguistic than human and directs attention toward our fundamental connectedness and basic need for one another. Following Plato’s definition of noble persuasion as true love, Weaver’s soul-forming rhetoric creating active patterns of tendency, Brockriede’s co-constitutive sexuo-rhetorical stances, Corder’s generative emergence, and Gunn’s suggestion that ontological contiguity resolves ethical problems inherent in symbolic “identification” and even “invitation,” “contact” is poised to operate as a new key term. Burkean Dramatism, the philosophy of the act that became one of the most central and widely influential twentieth-century visions of the field, starts with a cogito; one active agent works to but can never fully overcome real physical divisions with merely symbolic appeals to mythical unification. In contrast a Love rhetoric growing from a contact grammar proposes a-symbolic and physically embodied acting with, con- tact, as the prime communicative event and locus of meaning. Th e “dance of bodies” is a co-experience, a simultaneous IfeelyouYoufeelme unfolding as interpersonally known con-tact, and this shared Truth of aesthesis becomes both the criterion and analog for all genuine communication. Finally, Burke’s dialogue on communication as attitudinal dance puts this Truth of contact into grand theological perspective, where all of our discourses of knowledge

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and power are but concatenations of real, non-symbolic, pre-verbal postures struck with one another and the almighty unknown.

Pope Benedict XVI

In his landmark book Th e Sociology of Religion, Max Weber makes the poignant observation that, whether through gift s or training, “people diff er widely in their religious capacities.”38 Some people’s temperaments or personality traits may not be particularly well suited for the religious culture they are born into, whereas others with alternate talents and drives may thrive and blossom in the very same context. Th ose who range far beyond the madding crowd are termed “religious virtuosi,” people who have developed a habitus or “total personality pattern . . . of life integrally and methodically oriented to the values of religion” to so great an extent that they are, and thus can also produce, spiritual masterworks.39 What makes these people and their works so powerful is that, in a contingent world where even other believers are frequently blown to and fro by the winds of fashion, they are in possession of eternal spiritual truth. Unlike many others, virtuosi know that their religion’s ethic is genuinely viable and valid because they can and do “demonstrate” it in every action of their daily lives. Th is personally lived assurance and proof or “certainty of grace” grants a firm foundation to their rhetoric, an undeniable bedrock of Truth that secular speakers only rarely touch.40 One person who has thrived in his religious milieu and ranged far in his attitudinizing, a virtuoso who demonstrates assurance of grace, is Benedict XVI. Born Joseph Ratzinger in rural Bavaria in the late 1920s, his life began in a devout family and thoroughly Catholic community.41 With the rise of Nazism and World War II, the young seminarian served as a noncombatant, work that clarified his faith in response to the irdTh Reich’s repression of religion. When the war ended he resumed his studies and was ordained a priest in 1951. Th e theological career that followed is nothing short of stellar.42 His award-winning doctoral thesis on St. Augustine’s ecclesiology and prolific publication record earned him the role of (theological advisor) for Vatican II, and then a series of theology chairs at several top German universities, including Munich, Munster, and Regensburg. At the watershed Vatican II meetings, Ratzinger became a leader in the Resource- ment school of thought, a group of theologians committed to grounding contemporary Catholicism in the works of the early . Th is

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period saw the release of his most famous book, Introduction to (1968). Th e initial German and English editions were so popular they generated worldwide demand, and Ratzinger’s in-depth yet accessible description of the Creed was subsequently translated into 19 languages. During this time Ratzinger also helped to found , the renowned journal of and culture. His successful and influential work as a professor spanned nearly three decades, but in the late 1970s Ratzinger left the academy and, following a brief time as of Munich-Friesing, accepted John Paul II’s invitation to come to and lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the powerful dogma arm of the Vatican formerly known as Th e . Ratzinger’s time in Rome was spent in close cooperation with Pope John Paul II, and for more than two decades the two met every Friday to discuss key doctrinal issues and how the Church should respond and proceed.43 He continued to publish his research during this time but became much better and more widely known for confrontations with dissident theologians and a series of pronouncements from his office on the most controversial issues of our time, including abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and female ordination. Th e function of the Prefect is essentially conservative; he is charged with “protecting the deposit of faith,” and so Ratzinger became famous in the popular press with appellations like “Panzerkardinal,” “God’s Rottweiler,” and of course, the “Grand Inquisitor.” As the Ratzinger fan club put it, the Cardinal has been “putting the smackdown on heresy since 1981,” and he gained millions if not billions of supporters and detractors as a result.44 In addition to leading the Congregation, Ratzinger was also appointed President of the Catechism Commission by John Paul II, who entrusted him with the monumental task of overseeing publication of a new Catholic Catechism (1998), the fundamental book of Catholic teaching.45 Across Benedict’s long lifetime of voluminous work, basic rhetorical patterns and stylistic tendencies are fairly clear. In conversation the Pope is known as a careful listener, someone who responds only aft er devoting focused attention to others and reflecting on the issues at hand. Multiple commentators cited the Cardinal’s desire to listen and fully engage fellow discussants as a factor in his election to the papacy.46 Th is commitment to listening and engaged dialogue is evident in his formal speaking and writing as well. Even when serving as Prefect of an office designed to firmly define and protect doctrine, there was a sense of responsiveness. From Ratzinger’s perspective, when a theological error has enough adherents to

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warrant attention from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it is because there are also elements of Truth supporting the position, and it is the theologian’s task to listen carefully to distinguish and clarify these Truths. During his Prefecture many of his personal interviews and publications served to continue the discussion following controversial pronouncements from his office; rather than shut down public conversation and debate, this Prefect repeatedly engaged it.47 His last and most famous book of this sort is (2004), a closely argued response to the controversy that erupted following (2000), the Congregation’s declaration that Catholics still consider following Jesus essential for . Another marker of Pope Benedict’s rhetorical style is his close attention to and prayerful response to the Word of God. Th is is far more than just one relationship among many; for Benedict, Christianity’s triune God is the principle of relatability or communication itself. In “Th e Formal Structure of Christian Prayer,” he reinterprets the divine Logos in terms of “communica- tion” and “participation.”

Th e basic reason that man can speak with God is because God himself is speech, word. His nature is to speak, to hear, to reply, as we see particularly in Johannine theology, where Son and Spirit are described in terms of pure “hearing”; they speak in response to what they have first heard. Only because there is already speech, “Logos,” in God can there be speech, “Logos,” to God. Philosophically we could put it like this: the Logos in God is the ontological foundation for prayer. Th e prologue of John’s Gospel speaks of this connection in its very first sentences: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in communication with God” (1:1)—as a more precise translation of the Greek prós suggests, rather than the usual “with God.” It expresses the act of turning to God, of relationship. Since there is a relationship within God himself, there can also be a participation in this relationship. Th us we can relate to God in a way that does not contradict his nature.48

In retranslating the passive preposition “with” via a term denoting a reciprocal and active process, “in communication with,” Benedict shows how faith in the triune God is at the same time faith in contact and relating, belief in communion. God is Th e Word, and in Deus Caritas Est he goes on to explain how that word is Love. Upon his elevation Benedict’s public discourse became much less concerned with responding to controversial issues and much more concerned with

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revisiting and interpreting the fundamentals of the faith for contemporary audiences.49 Today’s papal office gives Benedict more than ample opportunity to explain Catholic doctrine. Th e modern Vatican is one of the world’s most prolific discursive organs, depending on the Pope for daily audiences, weekly broadcasts, addresses to frequent synods and conferences, all in addition to and frequently in support of the primary teaching genre, the encyclical letter.50 Th e fundamental yet fresh lines of thought introduced in Deus Caritas Est have been continued in two additional encyclicals, (Saved in Hope, 2007) and ( in Truth, 2009). His most recent book-length publication, part of a projected multivolume series, is called (2007), an international bestseller that lays out his personalist and narrative approach to Christology. In light of this account of Benedict’s virtuosic oeuvre and the embodied love rhetorics introduced above, two questions guide this reading of Deus Caritas Est: “What mode of contact does Benedict advocate?” and “How does he do it?” Although the two are inseparable, the first question is more dialectical in that it addresses Benedict’s Christian Truths about God-Human and Human-Human contact, and the second is more rhetorical in that it addresses issues of content development and expression in terms of invention, organization, and style.

Bodies and Love in Deus Caritas Est: Proposing Anthro-Theological Truth

Deus Caritas Est is divided into two major parts framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. Th e first major section discusses popular historical approaches to love and then describes Christianity’s understanding of love as a divine dynamic of transcendence and unification. eTh second major part defines the Church as a “Community of Love” and lays out principles for public and ecclesial work that can put Christian love into practice. Th e two sections are deeply interconnected and call for sequential reading; in theological terms orthodoxy leads to orthopraxy: they are inseparably tied with right thought directing correct practice. Part one is thus dialectical, defining key terms and explaining their relation to one another, and part two derives an ethic (habitus) or mode of action from those terms. It is this concrete mode of action that becomes Catholicism’s most powerful rhetoric—by fully enacting Christian love, all of humanity can be inspired to turn toward and with the divine.

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Introduction: “Encountering” and “Responding” to Divine Love Th e Introduction consists of three brief paragraphs; the first two describe the “heart” of Christianity, and the third specifies Benedict’s context and purpose, and previews the encyclical’s structure. Th e first words follow tradition in both titling and opening the letter with a passage from Scripture; for his major premise Benedict quotes the definition of God and the “resulting” image of humanity from the First Letter of John: “‘God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.’ . . . We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.”51 In Benedict’s interpretation this passage expresses the divine-human “encounter” that gives Christianity its fundamental orientation. “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a loft y idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”52 God’s love, met in personal contact with Jesus and his message, gives humanity a new relation to both God and one another. Where Old Testament law commanded human love for God from on high, Jesus’s incarnation shows the depth and reality of that same God’s love for humanity and in so doing shift s the impetus for love from divine command to human response. “Jesus united into a single precept this commandment of love for God and the commandment of love for neighbor. . . . Since God has first loved us (cf.1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.”53 Here God is no longer primarily a law-giver, and humanity’s defining religious act is much more than ritual or ethical obedience. Instead, God is a close and personal lover, sharing the gift of himself with his beloved creatures, who in responding to and accepting the gift become lovers themselves.54 In speech-act terms, moving from “command” to “response” introduces radically diff erent roles and possibilities for both God and Man, and it is this bold move, from the former “grand inquisitor,” that formally inaugurates Benedict’s papacy. By eclipsing unilateral commands with the divine person of Jesus and humanity’s response to his concrete demonstration of love, Benedict dramatizes all of history as a grand love story between God and humanity, humanity and God. Th ese opening paragraphs are powerful in their sea-change quality, but in engaging religious discourse, whether it is Scripture, papal encyclicals, or local preaching, textual coherence and persuasive force are always dependent on the reader’s or listener’s orientation to faith. As a professional exegete,

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Benedict follows Augustine in affirming that one can only truly understand a culture when standing within it.55 All readers and all texts are inseparable from their living contexts, and for Benedict’s encyclicals, this audience and context is clearly the Church; all three of Benedict’s encyclical letters are addressed only to Catholics.56 Where nonbelievers know and apply alternate systems of meaning to define key terms, such as “God” or “love,” the faithful read Scripture and the canon to learn their true meaning.57 When we disal- low the possibility of a-cultural reading and recognize that alter-cultural readings necessarily “pre-comprehend” and thus distort, faith in the text and participation in its historical community become the only hermeneutic capable of genuine exegesis. To make sense of theology the reader or critic must, at minimum, enter its world and entertain its basic assumptions, like the existence of God and Jesus’s incarnation, in order to engage the discourse as its prophetic self.58 Th at is, for most nonbelievers, theology is nonsensical. However, for interested nonbelievers willing to use the only sensible key available, risking a herme- neutic of faith and reading theology as if it may be true, the degree to which the faith employed and encountered in reading meets both reason and the initial motives driving the reading gauges the text’s level of persuasive force.59 Th us both believers and interested nonbelievers are a more or less favorably disposed audience willing to learn, whereas uninterested nonbelievers are already persuaded otherwise and tend to avoid religious discourses altogether. Th e rhetorical challenge with this sort of nonbeliever is to spark interest and encourage engagement.60 In the final introductory paragraph, this is Benedict’s expressly stated context and purpose, to propose and encourage worldwide love as a joyous and true alternative to the popular conceptions of God and humanity that inspire our all-too-frequent and widespread acts of vengeance, hatred, and violence—by speaking “of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others. . . . I wish to emphasize some basic elements [of Christian love], so as to call forth in the world renewed energy and commitment in the human response to God’s love.”61

Part I: “The Unity of Love in Creation and in Salvation History” Part one is philosophical and speculative, striving to “clarify some essential facts” concerning God’s love and its link to human love.62 Th e section opens with a synthetic discussion of love’s polysemy, of how the term is overused

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and assigned disparate referents, causing confusion about our most important commitments and connections. Dialogically, Benedict uses a question to set up the rest of Part I—“are all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally diff erent realities?”63 Benedict’s realism, his firm confidence that speculative philosophy deals in facts, is far from old-fashioned linguistic or religious naïveté. He is acutely aware of positivism’s dismissal of spirituality as unverifiable superstition, of postmodern social constructivism, of language’s epistemic and rhetorical functions, and of relativism’s “dictatorship” over contemporary culture. He has thought these challenges through, and he does not cede reality to them. For him science has no exclusive claim to truth or facticity; and although cultures certainly do build up society through language and the arts, it is definitely not text all the way down. Past all the constructions, all the way down to what’s really real, he finds humanity, body and soul created for love. Benedict’s answer to the question of love’s unity is worked out in a discussion of ancient Greek and biblical approaches to love and a response to Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. Eros is the Greek term for passionate attraction, “[t]hat love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.”64 Th e Greek Bible however, avoids eros and uses to denote the new Christian ap- proach to love as self-gift . Th is is where Nietzsche and the Enlightenment critique of Christian sexuality take issue—eros is natural and exhilarating and should be celebrated; in promoting agape, religion “poisons” eros and turns it into vice. Benedict accepts Nietzsche’s critique of Christian sexuality as a legitimate query that continues to resonate today in popular conceptions of love. Rather than debating philosophical rivals or correcting spiritual errors, he is engaging important questions that deserve attention and response. “Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn’t she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift off ers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?”65 In answer, the history lesson continues. to Biblical religion, eros was indeed celebrated as a sort of intoxication and divinely inspired madness that overwhelms us with the joy of sex. When this erotic striving for the divine developed into more or less organized celebrations as religion, it took the form of fertility cults and sacred prostitution. As Old Testament religion

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arises, it certainly does oppose these cults, but it does not aim at destroying eros itself, only this “warped and destructive” form of worship. In the cultic temple eros is encountered via the prostitute, a clear “use” of the other that warps love’s divine potential.

Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing “divine madness”: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited. An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide, not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.66

Benedict’s argument here turns on the co-constitutive quality of embodied contact explained by Brockriede. Nietzsche’s goal of rescuing eros with a return to the Dionysian cult reflects a Cartesian understanding of eroticism, one cogito reaching for the divine. And yes, when limited to the perspective of a solo act, the worshipper does indeed experience a moment of divine ecstasy. But obviously more than one person is required for this form of worship. From a contact perspective, in using prostitution to access divinity, the worshipper becomes an exploiter and the priestess is degraded to a mere means or instrument. If love is going to be more than user ecstasy and usee utility, then a new mode of erotic contact is required. Here eros is not poisoned, suppressed, or dismissed, it is met head on and “healed,” “disciplined and purified,” and shown a path of ascent leading to sustained divinity. This divine pinnacle is not abstract or conceptual; it is described twice as both “certain” and “foretasted,” an oral and qualitatively felt experience establishing and pointing to physically known truth. Th e premise or basic “fact” underpinning Benedict’s point here is a definition of humanity as a “unity in duality.”67 Human beings are composed of both body and soul, and in fully joining these two elements eros is trans- formed from a self-centered and instinctive rut into other-directed divine union. “[I]t is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united does man attain his full stature.”68 In denying or mythologizing the soul and situating ethics in a social contract or utilitarian calculation, the Enlightenment has missed the constitutive

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link between action and ethos; using is nothing like a divine ascent, it only creates a user and a usee. Having responded to Nietzsche’s critique, Benedict can turn to its echoes in contemporary sexuality, where eros is not generally considered a mode of divine worship but a material and biological process. In adopting biological standards for the body, modernity ignores spirituality and reifies eros into just another object to be manipulated. “Eros, reduced to pure ‘sex,’ has become a commodity, a mere ‘thing’ to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity.”69 Th is utilitarian and materialist approach to the body is far more than just the modern spin on prostitution or the sex-slave trade; it is the same perspective that motivates and justifies today’s entire set of bioethical dilemmas—abortion, fetal tissue experimenta- tion, organ harvesting, stem cell research, and genetic manipulation—all of which only appear viable once eros has been debased. Th us in diff erent but related ways both ancient Dionysian orgiastic cults and modern biological commodification are said to “warp and destroy”eros by divorcing the spirit from the body and placing a solo user at the center of human subjectivity. Love in both eras is cast as a sad misuse and abuse of divine potential that requires “healing” via a path of “ascent and purification.” Benedict again uses direct and clear questions as transitional devices to bring the reader to the next point in his argument, policy questions that any attentive reader would already be considering. “Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification entail?”70 His response introduces ancient Hebrew conceptions of love from the , Old Testament poetry celebrating conjugal love with vivid physical imagery.71 Th e first Hebrew term for love encountered there is dodim, an uncertain and searching love that is gradually replaced by ahaba, “concern and care for the other” as the couple grows more and more deeply in love. In Greek, ahaba is translated as agape, and it is this other-directed mode of love that represents the biblical contribution to understanding eros—“No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation, and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.”72 In directing action to both the Other and the Good, the lovers transcend themselves, surpassing the limits of the cogito by forging a “definitive” love born of mutual self-gift . Th is love is “definitive” both in the sense of being “exclusive” or committed to a specific other, and “eternal” in the sense of being for all time. Historically eros and agape are frequently cast as opposites, with the Christian tradition usually over-emphasizing agape, and a range of secular

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and cultic religious traditions exalting eros and the body to the neglect of both others’ bodies and the soul.73 Benedict refuses to polarize these two modes, arguing instead for their inseparability in the divine-human dynamic of giving and receiving. We are creatures: borne from and by Others, we cannot simply will ourselves into existence, and so without first receiving, one would have nothing to give. His case for the unity of love closes with a summative response to the opening questions: love is “a single reality” composed of both erotic and agapic dimensions, both of which are necessary for human fulfillment. usTh faith is not opposed to eros and the body, but instead represents a desire to contribute something “new” to instinctive or secular loving. “[B]iblical faith does not set up a parallel universe, or one opposed to that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts the whole man; it intervenes in his search for love in order to purify it and to reveal new dimensions of it.”74 At this point, midway into a dialectical history of orthodox principles and their attendant policies, Benedict’s Christian “intervention” is at its most clearly discursive and traditionally rhetorical; in off ering new terms and imagery for understanding human and divine nature, he proposes the Christian option. Th e remainder of Part I advances this idea that biblical faith is “new,” in the sense of presenting images of both God and humanity that are both historically and philosophically unprecedented. Th e Old Testament not only proclaims monotheism to a pantheistic world, it specifies that this one God is a father and creator who loves and cares for his creatures. His love for Israel is “personal” and “elective”; the are God’s chosen people, and his love for them is described by the prophets with “boldly erotic images” and “metaphors of betrothal and marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and prostitu- tion.”75 Moreover, God’s love is entirely gratuitous and forgiving. When faced with adulterous idolatry, punishment would be just, but Ephraim is spared because God’s love is “so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. . . . God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love.”76 Unlike the bright yet cold clarity of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, this creative Logos passionately desires humanity; in warmly reaching out and freely giving all, God unites eros and agape. Th e Old Testament vision of Man is also new in that it proposes a loving monogamous heterosexual relationship as the completion of humanity. Adam’s eros seeks not mere sex but a wife, a unique and definitive bond, in the same way that the monotheistic God desires exclusive commitment from

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the Jewish people. “God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love. Th is close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.”77 With the New Testament the focus is not on new ideas; instead it renders the Old Testament image of God concrete in the person of Jesus. Th is personal realism is itself “unprecedented” and “radical” and becomes the departure point for Benedict’s reading of Jesus’s parables and life.

Th is divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the “stray sheep,” a suff ering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes aft er the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. Th is is love in its most radical form.78

Th e parables are to be interpreted as explanations of the grand narrative of Christ’s life and death. God goes aft er and embraces humanity, and he delivers far more than a message: he gives his very self. In McLuhan’s terms, the medium is the message; Jesus is divine love incarnate.79 Jesus suff ers and dies to physically demonstrate the possibility and reality of a love so extreme that not only does it have the potential to turn hearts, it trumps the principle of justice itself. Here we find a central point of the Christian drama as a contact rhetoric. God is not divided from humanity. Far from it, he becomes human to meet us and show us the way to fulfillment. He communes with humanity, and in entering communion with Him, we make the turn to love. Jesus casts divine communion in fully embodied terms by making the Eucharist the basic of Christianity. In institutionalizing his self-gift as a ritual meal, sharing his body and blood, the Logos now becomes loving sustenance.80 Th e Catholic Mass is not so much an opportunity to hear Christ’s message as it is grateful and joyous acceptance of life-sustaining gift s.81 “More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving.”82 Bread and wine, food and drink, body and blood become fully integrated corporeally—instead of “static reception” of the word or even active interpretation of symbolism, the Eucharist makes God’s gift a physical part of the communicants and at the same time makes

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them a part of the Body of Christ. Reception would require a gulf for a message to cross; in partaking of Christ’s flesh and blood, the gulf is abolished and a-symbolic unity is achieved. Th is interpretation of the Eucharist forms the foundation of Benedict’s ecclesiology and , his definition of the Church and its mode of contact with humanity at large. In this sacramental dynamic all communicants not only become one with Christ, they become one with one another, a single “body.”

As Paul says, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (1 Cor 10:17). Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him and, thus, towards unity with all Christians. We become “one body,” completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbor are now truly united . . . 83

An important ecumenical distinction here is that union into a single body cannot be limited to a set of fellow Christians because Christ has given Himself to all. Division is simply not Christian.84 To explain this idea, Benedict interprets the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Last Judgment to show that “neighbor” is no longer a geographic or genetic term, it is universal. “Anyone who needs me, and whom I can help, is my neighbor.”85 In this way Christian loving resists symbolic abstraction and calls for active response to pain and suff ering, here and now. Th is is no small matter—engaging neighbors becomes both the path to salvation and the ultimate moral criterion. Th e Other is not an Other at all, he is a divine , and in helping him we build up the one Body and bring everyone closer to God. “‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ (Mt 25:40). Love of God and love of neighbor have become one.”86 Th is identity between divine love and human love expresses the basic rationale motivating Christian contact—in reaching out to neighbors one is reaching out to God, and conversely, in turning away from that neighbor one turns from God. Benedict closes Part I with two summative questions, phrased in his now familiar forthright style: “[C]an we love God without seeing him? And can love be commanded?”87 Th ese are not lightweight issues. Th e first question drives criticism from every atheist, every positivist, every materialist. Th e second queries both the form and basic message of Christianity—doesn’t

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a divine command to love God and neighbor deny the principle of human freedom? His summative responses return to the divine-human “encounter” and “response” phrasing of the opening paragraph. He agrees that we cannot see God “as he is,” but he is definitely “visible” and accessible to humanity. Jesus “appeared in our midst” and his love “encounters us ever anew” across the span of Church history in the Mass, the , the , and in the “living community of believers.”88 A loving engagement between God and humanity is thus well underway, in process and growing; in “encountering” Jesus and the Church we find that we are meeting a warm and gratuitous lover who was already there; we are always already loved. Th is first-ness, the primacy and given-ness of God’s love shift s the locus of motives from “command” to “response.” Benedict’s turn from symbolic commands to love in proximate action achieves what no languaging ever could, genuine and authentic transcendence. “Contact with the visible manifestations of God’s love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved.”89 It is the concrete human community of believers that makes God’s love manifest as they reach out to neighbors, who in feeling loved are in turn inspired to do the same, with an ultimate goal of peace and unity for all of humanity. Christian transcendence thus presents a contiguous ontological process that frees rhetoric from its drama of deceits and transforms it into a divine dynamic of unifying love. A simple closing encapsulates this revolutionary power of divine love.

Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a “we” which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).90

Part II: “Caritas—The Practice of Love by the Church as a ‘Community of Love’” Having proposed the Catholic vision of God and humanity, in Part II Benedict defines the Church as a “Community of Love” and goes on to show how this community must put its love into practice as a “service of charity.” His discussion of orthopraxy opens with a quotation from Augustine that serves to anchor practice firmly in doctrine. “If you see charity, you see the ” reiterates the idea of God as the principle of divine communication.91 In simultaneously being both three and one, Father, Son, and Spirit, one and

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many, the Triune God is perfect relation, relatability itself.92 In dying on the Cross Jesus shares his Spirit with humanity, “harmonizing” believers with Christ and “energizing” our “hearts” and “moving” us to love all.93 Th e Holy Spirit thus represents the basic motivating force of Christian outreach, the font of Christo-rhetorical action in the world. Th ere are five major subdivisions to the body of Part II, each becom- ing successively more specific as Benedict gradually narrows his focus to Catholics themselves.94 Th e first defines charity as a “constitutive” function and “responsibility” of the Church. Love of God and neighbor are not merely the responsibility of individuals, but of the entire Church at all levels.95 “As a community, the Church must practice love. Love thus needs to be organized if it is to be an ordered service to the community.”96 Characteristically, professorially, Benedict contextualizes the communal imperative of orderly love with a lesson on early church history. In the beginning the Apostolic community shared everything, especially with the poor and downtrodden, in a “radical form of material communion.” As the Church grew the Diaconate was formed, and a “ministry of charity expressed in a communitarian, orderly way” grew alongside proclamation of the Word and administration of the sacraments as a fundamental ecclesial function.97 Benedict’s history lesson on Christian charity not only for believers but for all in need continues through the sixth century, and for a powerful closing steps back to A.D. 363 to cite the example of Julian the Apostate. Julian blamed Christians for assassinating his family, a brutal act he witnessed as a child of six. Accordingly, he rejected Christianity and upon coming to power restored Paganism as the official state religion with the hope of motivating his entire empire.

In this project he was amply inspired by Christianity. He established a hierarchy of metropolitans and priests who were to foster love of God and neighbor. In one of his letters, he wrote that the sole aspect of Christianity which had impressed him was the Church’s charitable activity. . . . According to him, this was the reason for the popularity of the “Galileans.” Th ey needed now to be imitated and outdone.98

To clinch his first point on orthopraxy, the Pope is citing an Apostate, an Emperor actively working against the Church, as an example of the persuasive power of charity! Th e orderly Christian practice of caring for all, especially the needy and dispossessed, succeeds in teaching an enemy and even Paganism itself to love.

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Th e second subdivision is “Justice and Charity,” a passive response to the Marxist critique of charity as a rich man’s dodge that maintains an oppressive status quo. Th is is ideological territory intimately familiar to Benedict from his time as a Prefect charged with confronting American proponents of Liberation Th eology. “[T]he poor, it is claimed, do not need charity but justice.”99 Benedict casts Marxism’s “truth” that the State must guarantee justice for all as consistent with Biblical faith, and goes on to admit that the Church was “slow to realize” how the rise of industrialization and capitalism required rethinking the nature of a just social order. He traces a series of papal encyclicals between 1891 and 1991 that “gradually” seek to modernize the Church’s social teaching, and then presents the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church as the summative expression of lessons learned. While the popes were busy developing doctrine, Marxism attempted its revolutions and failed miserably; today it’s “illusion has vanished.”100 In this way Marxism is not argued with or debated against—in its historical struggle it is allowed to prove to itself and the world that violent revolution and justice are simply not compatible and that collectivizing production creates its own set of social maladies. Th e remainder of the subsection outlines two key points from the Catholic teaching on justice and charity that was growing throughout the twentieth century. First, Jesus clearly established a fundamental distinction between Church and State. Just States are the responsibility of , and a basic responsibility of any just State is to guarantee freedom of religion. Th e Church is thus a community that the State recognizes and vice versa, but neither controls the other. Political action is necessarily ethical action, and it is here that the Church sees its role in realizing justice. Rather than attempt to reform state institutions like the judiciary or the military, the Church works at the level of reason and the individual citizen, aiming to “help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as a greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest.”101 When reason attempts to operate independently, it is frequently manipulated and bent by the will to power, and it is the Church’s goal to “purify” political reasoning, “form” conscience, and “reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper.”102 By adopting individual hearts and minds as its audience, the Church contributes to justice without overstepping to legislate it. Second, even when a just State is established, people will still need more

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than any bureaucracy can ever provide. People will always need love. Here Benedict is openly fatalistic.

Th ere will always be suff ering which cries out for consolation and help. Th ere will always be loneliness. Th ere will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbor is indispensable. Th e State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suff ering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.103

In the face of our deep-seated need for personal caring, as opposed to our requirement for our institutional due, the most a just State can do is acknowl- edge and support its member communities that can and do provide the love that the State cannot.104 Th e is thus cast as a community serving vital human functions that simply cannot be given over to the State because they require a complex of motives that reaches beyond justice to love. Th e final three subsections of Part II describe contemporary charity organizations in general, in particular, and Catholic charity workers in detail. In this way, Benedict closes his discourse on orthopraxy by addressing lovers themselves in terms of their overall field, their voca- tion within that field, and their personal mode of practice. This thoroughly particular and concrete closing could appear quite distant from the letter’s “speculative and philosophical” opening, but in fact it is its direct result. Love, truly and fully understood, inspires its own enactment. “Love begets love.” Today mass communication and globalization mean that all charities are faced with need on a world scale. State organizations and secular humanitar- ian agencies have far greater reach than individual citizens, and Benedict praises the growth of international solidarity within the social work sector. He explicitly thanks all aid workers, and reaffirms John Paul II’s commitment to cooperate with civil and secular charities wherever possible. But Christian love is not the same as state aid, and Benedict goes on to explain the distinctive character that Christian assistance lends all such partnerships with a simple transitional question: “So what are the essential elements of Christian and ecclesial charity?”105 Th ree essential qualities mark the Christian mode of love. Th e first is immediacy in both its temporal and interpersonal senses. Benedict again cites the Good Samaritan’s unhesitating response to a specific concrete need.

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He continues, specifying that Caritas and other Church organizations must provide more than professional training for their workers, they also need a “formation of the heart” that “awakens their love and opens their spirits to others.”106 Only “heartfelt concern” can engage the other at our most human level; without this loving attitude merely technical and professional aid transforms the beloved into the problem, robbing the needy of their dignity and worth.107 Second, Christian charity is agenda-free, maintaining complete independence from political parties and . Here Benedict returns to the Marxist critique of charity and reiterates his point that today’s needy cannot be ignored or “sacrificed” in the name of any utopian future. “One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now. We contribute to a better world only by personally doing good now, with full commitment and wherever we have the opportunity, independently of partisan strategies and programs.”108 Th is agenda-free quality of Christian love means that it is not merely apolitical, it extends even to religious ideologies. Benedict’s third element of charity is its pure and gratuitous quality, a fundamental noninstrumentality that off ers a profoundly simple, powerful, and humane mode of contact.

Love is free; it is not practiced as a way of achieving other ends. But this does not mean that charitable activity must somehow leave God and Christ aside. For it is always concerned with the whole man. Oft en the deepest cause of suff ering is the very absence of God. oseTh who practice charity in the Church’s name will never seek to impose the Church’s faith upon others. Th ey realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8) and that God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love. He knows . . . that disdain for love is disdain for God and man alike; it is an attempt to do without God. Consequently, the best defense of God and man consists precisely in love.109

Defense and apologia are the perennial rhetorical genres that argue with nonbelievers, and here Benedict brackets this entire agonistic tradition of religious argumentation and debate into a kind of kairotic and imperfect subgenre. Only occasionally is discourse appropriate, and only occasionally is it “best.” Agenda-less silent love, “free” and “pure and generous,” immediate

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and real, enables all Others, even those not currently disposed to listen, to witness and feel God with their “whole” being, body and soul. In this way Christian contact obtains a persuasive power and force that speech itself frequently prevents. Moreover, this Christian rhetorical potency derives from no understanding of discursive technique but directly out of intimately knowing and fully enacting Benedict’s thesis, God is Love. Part II closes with a direct address to the Bishops and everyone exercising charity in the name of the Church. Benedict summarizes caritas and adds two further qualities to his portrait of the Christian lover, humility and a prayer- ful “personal relationship” with God. “[R]adical humility” affirms both the divinity of those in need and God’s divine power. Following Christ’s example, charity workers give far more than material aid, they share themselves: “My deep personal sharing in the needs and suff erings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift .” 110 Material gift s too oft en introduce hierarchal relations of social obligation; when they are merged with humble and genuine self-gift they become inspirational for both parties.111 In Benedict’s active love terminology from Part I, unifying eros and agape turns all hearts. Here serving others is not a unilateral relation mediated via a material gift , it is a-mediate interpersonal contact drawing both parties closer to God. Humility before God is thus equally essential because it is his grace that enriches and enables helpers; their relative wealth and position are not due to personal “merit or achievement of their own” but rather to God’s loving work. Decentering self and patiently trusting in the will of God frees helpers from any feeling of overwhelming personal responsibility or impotence in the face of global problems. As Benedict notes, “In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord. It is God who governs the world, not we.”112 Finally, a “personal relationship” with God achieved through prayer demonstrates faith and generates “new strength” and “hope” to bring to the challenge of ministering to the needy. Benedict cites Mother Th eresa, Job, Jesus, and Augustine on the centrality of prayer in Christianity’s loving dynamic—believers who pray seek an “encounter” and “dialogue” with God. Even when they cry out in confusion and suff ering, prayer is not any expres- sion of challenge or doubt, but a response to his divine and thus inexplicable will. “Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the ‘goodness and loving kindness

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of God’ (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.”113 Benedict’s joyous praise of this true and unshakable certainty of faith’s power to win and enlighten souls summarizes and closes his call to orthopraxy. Th e faithful always begin with

. . . the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! . . . Love is the light—and in the end, the only light—that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world—this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical.114

“Conclusion”—Humans Manifest Divine Love Benedict’s inaugural letter concludes with three brief paragraphs on the Saints and a prayer to Mary, mother of God and foremost Saint. As exemplars of fully Christian subjectivity, the Saints, like Christ, make God’s love real here on Earth. Jesus’s humano-divine simile, “[A]s you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me,” drives Christian outreach from Martin of Tours through St. Anthony and the epoch-making monastic movement he inspired. Saints are the “true bearers of light within history,” an apt enlightenment metaphor praising both humble service to God and saving truth for man.115 Benedict follows John Paul II’s passion for Mary and devotes his final two paragraphs and closing prayer to her “pure love which is not self-seeking but simply benevolent.”116 Mary’s humility and complete faith enable her to bear Jesus and save humanity. In a letter about God, an orthodox lesson on how God is Love, Benedict concludes with the saints and Mary, all of them human. Without humanity’s active response to God’s love, no good is accomplished here on Earth, and so Benedict’s closing prayer is a hymn of praise and entreaty to Mary, not her divine child:

Holy Mary, Mother of God, you have given the world its true light, Jesus, your Son—the Son of God. You abandoned yourself completely to God’s call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

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Show us Jesus. Lead us to him. Teach us to know and love him, so that we too can become capable of true love and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.117

In the Christian love dynamic God goes first, he is the Father and creator, and precisely because he calls seeking a genuine and fertile interpersonal relationship, as opposed to persuasive delivery of his message, human reception and even understanding are simply not enough. God’s loving contact longs for and inspires a loving spirituo-physical acceptance; the love between God and Mary is not about and does not create discourse—their creative love births a real person who embodies and enacts true love, giving and showing humanity what it needs most. Benedict’s prayer shift s between Johannine terms, from light to water, moving this idea through beautiful biblical imagery for a particularly powerful closing to his inaugural encyclical. Jesus is “true light,” but this metaphor of vision and knowledge, where focus and perspective require distance, is the direct result of God’s “flow” and Mary’s faithful “wellspring.” Mary’s font of “living water” shares necessary and constitutive bodily sustenance, and it is this physical gift of life that can “show,” “lead,” and “teach” our “thirsting world.”

Conclusion: What mode? How? Love!

Th e answers to this essay’s two critical questions, “What mode of contact does Benedict advocate?” and “How does he do it?,” are now apparent. Part I describes the mode of contact as Christian love, a pure and real love that unites eros and agape to engage and embrace whole people, body and soul. Loving in this way grows out of feeling and knowing that God is Love and thus has specific qualities that distinguish it from other modes motivated by diff ering definitions of love. For Benedict, Christian contact is immediate, interpersonal, agenda-free, gratuitous, oft en silent, humble, orderly, heartfelt, material, and spiritual. Such supra-rational and radically charitable love inspires love in return, and this is the reason for Christianity’s continued success as a major world religion. In Part II Benedict invites applied love in public aff airs by operationalizing Christian contact as specific practices (orthopraxy) for Catholics in their civic and ecclesial work. In the past social encyclicals were scenic and focused on public sphere problems, facts, and the reform of institutions by adopting an objective and external gaze. Establishing

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a personal tone for his papacy, Benedict opts instead for a thoroughly concrete attention to Catholics themselves as citizens and social agents, real and “whole” people with a body and soul who constitute the State. Here the role of the Church is not to replace or even directly reform the State, it is to engage its people and aid in forming conscience and purifying reason. Without knowing the pure and gratuitous love of , reason is too oft en bent by the will to power, and conscience is too frequently blinded by personal interest. In sharing Jesus’s love on a personal level, the Church indirectly yet constitutively influences the public sphere. Hearts are turned and the world is saved through the power of love, a love so pure that even Julian and Paganism can learn and act on Christ’s lesson that love of God and love of neighbor are one and the same. And “how does Benedict advocate Christian love?” Can and does the Pope practice what he preaches? Th e encyclical letter is a monologic genre, but Benedict exhibits a dialogic style in his general method and approach to argumentation. As an academic theologian and professional scholar, issues and concepts are invariably placed into historical context, with close attention to fundamental philosophical questions and the people who have worked to answer them throughout the ages. His audience and interlocutors are thus not limited to particular sets of contemporaries; he is also writing in response to and for the advancement of the entire span of human inquiry.118 Following Aquinas, key philosophical questions are not simply covered, they are fully and explicitly posed as legitimate queries from historical luminaries before they are engaged. His command of intellectual and religious history is broad, yet he brings this range of knowledge and citations to bear directly on the vocabulary and issues presented in the question at hand, lending a sense of clarity and purpose to a generally dense prose style. His points are also rendered accessible via the deliberate organizational cues of a trained academic writer—precisely defined terms, claims explicitly linked to supports, structured paragraphs, simple previews, concise restatements and summaries, and clearly labeled subdivisions all work to render his argumentation lucid despite its tightly packed and deeply spiritual content. In terms of rhetorical attitude, Benedict’s faith in the eternal Logos places him in a position of humility before divine creation; he is a not an authority inventing, creating, or even declaring truths. Instead he casts himself as a fellow “cooperators veritatis,” our “co-worker” helping us to discover the truth.119 It takes time to read and process Benedict’s prose, but once the eff ort is devoted, there is little question about his motivation and meaning. At points

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the depth yet simplicity of his thought and feeling, his ardent desire for and firm belief in communion with the reader, joyfully proposed via “unadorned” reason and beautiful biblical imagery, is safely described as “inspirational.”120 In Catholic tradition the Pope’s leadership of the flock is considered in terms of three functions: teaching, sanctifying, and ruling. As a successful professor of so many years, it was expected that Benedict would stress the teaching function of his office. What excited and surprised many audiences reading Deus Caritas Est was not that he was teaching, it was his teaching style and fresh development of fundamental, presumably known and granted, topics.121 Rather than the specialized or authoritarian stance one might expect from a respected giant in his field, let alone an Inquisitor recently rendered infallible, Benedict’s style, while certainly learned and clear, is at the same time warm, pastoral, and at points inspired.122 His topoi are the basic ele- ments of Jesus’s message: Love, Hope, Truth, Faith and Salvation, articles that Benedict proposes as a positive alternative to today’s anomie, nihilism, and the “dictatorship of relativism” governing postmodern social thought.123 In clearly laying out the reasoning behind doctrine and expressing the enthusiasm and inspiration it brings, Benedict unites preaching and education, speaking out of both deep meditation on content and loving care for the student. By responding to significant challenges and critiques in historical and rational terms, Benedict clarifies complex relationships between faith and reason, justice and charity, and rhetoric and religion. In this way, he approaches Weber’s virtuosic ethos for religious rhetors, the wise and knowledgeable teacher fully merged with the inspirational preacher, truth and beauty united in pursuit of Good. Th e theoretical question, “How can Christian loving inform contemporary rhetorical theory?,” is answered straightforwardly: “by making loving contact the archetype and proposing contiguous subjects with a composite body and soul.” Benedict’s interpersonal terms of meeting, “encounter” and “response,” push solo discursive actors from the center of rhetorical theory and repopulate it with whole persons making more and less intimate contact. All subjects live through and for others, a presymbolic unity, but oratory or any mediated attempt at communication introduces a gulf into the ontological scene. In studying this dividing gulf and the tenuous across-ness that symbols both create and enable, a contact orientation redirects attention to underlying embodied modes of intercourse, where shared meaning and even Truth are generated in the immediacy of a firmly co-known tactile press. InDeus Caritas Est charity trumps oratory in persuasive force, or mathematically:

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reaching out and helping someone up is worth x words, where the value of x is directly proportional to co-felt depth of need. In this sense Benedict demonstrates the warmth, power, and validity of loving contact as an ethical and arguably the only humane mode of persuasion. Of course the encyclical is itself a discursive contact; it’s a letter addressed to all Catholics that falls well within the traditional province of rhetoric. Since language introduces division, mediated rhetorics are at a disadvantage, but there are still many times when discourse is called for.124 Inaugurating a global leadership role is certainly one of these times; in Corder’s terms Benedict “emerges” as argument in Deus Caritas Est, and in Brockriede’s terms it becomes the critic’s role to assess the outreach stance and quality of the relation achieved. Discourse guarantees gulf, is made for gulfs. How best to reach across? In his call to love Benedict clearly acts as a Brockriedean lover, and in explicitly opting for the invitational mode, he exemplifies and legitimates Foss and Griffin’s relational ethic. Because the people on the other side of the linguistic gulf are beloved, the outreach is necessarily characterized by both respect and desire. Unlike rape or seduction, true love can never be caused but only inspired, so eff ective inviting always involves respect for the other’s freedom and rationality added to ardent yearning for communion. Far from civically oriented argument modes that advance motions against opposition, when addressing beloveds they must be invited, proposed to, and hopefully engaged. In proposing love, off ering “new” visions of God and humanity and their attendant orthopraxy, Benedict hopes for a loving response, a “renewed energy and commitment in the human response to God’s love.”125 Th is reading considers Deus Caritas Est a masterwork with important implications for rhetorical theory, but it’s informative to observe how and why Benedict fails several of Corder’s criteria for evaluating how discursive arguments and people should emerge as love. His pious humility eff ectively prevents an authoritative “posture of presumption,” and he does take responsibility for creating conditions that enable mutuality, but in the long term Benedict’s mutuality is also a unity. All emergent and argumentative Others are welcome and beloved, but there is only one final answer to all queries—God is Love. In pursuing an atomized world of relativistic diversity, Corder asks us to argue provisionally, but for Benedict the Holy Spirit promises intersubjective unity and the archetype is the Trinity, where three can and does equal one. Th e dynamic balance of Christian love proposes a both/and relation, a harmonious higher unity that is achieved without seeking complete dissolution of diff erence. Here subjects are distinct identities who

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are unite-able as complementary members of the mystical body of Christ; multiple members integrating into an organic whole motivated by the belief that God is realized in perfecting their mutual contact. Instead of wanting to create space and time where divergent views can coexist, Benedict’s goal reaches far beyond tolerance to a divine convergence of “all in all.” World-wide communion is a very long-term goal. In the short term Benedict is firm in his belief that genuine and personal agenda-free love is the Christian way; showing others this love is frequently much more important than arguing with them about it. In Christian ontology free and finite identities do not contradict unity; instead selves are divine creations living in a social world of equally free and divine partners. With this doctrine evil is divine freedom used badly, turning from God; and so diff erences and even evildoers are not to be divided or destroyed but rather engaged and hopefully turned and transformed in the higher union of love. Such a doctrine emerges as pure and forgiving love—as Other-directed sacrifice extending even to the point of excess and apparent folly—proves concern, inspires conversion, and works to bring all closer to God. When charity is valued over rationality and even justice, many of the pitfalls of argumenta- tive emergence that Corder’s discursive criteria were designed to avoid are bypassed. Relativistic provisionality, arguing that God might be Love, is not merely inappropriate because the encyclical addresses a flock of believers; it is impossible because both Benedict and the flock have felt God’s love and thus already know it to be True. Th ere are Platonic strains in contemporary theory that coherently relate rhetoric and love, while other widely popular and influential currents tragi- cally prevent it. In some aspects of identifying and dividing, and most clearly in “inducing,” Dramatistic of the Act commit to a Cartesian cogito so completely Other that the rhetor attempts to mechanistically cause cooperation instead of humanely inviting it. Like the warped love of the Dionysian worshipper using the temple prostitute in a futile search for God, deliberate inducement itself prevents identification by connecting lone symbol-users with the Other as a means rather than an end. Likewise, putting the instrumental word in place of the loving stroke leads Logologistic philosophies of Agency toward relativism and utilitarianism, ethics that limit rhetorical ontology and subjectivity. Happily, other avenues in Burkean theory, his revolutionary attitudinal dance and grand theological perspective, now appear as rich resources for helping rhetoric move past dramatism and logology and into loving aesthesis, where engaging the Other off ers a path

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to God and Truth. In this spirit, recasting the logologer’s Definition of Man in terms of Christian contact can summarize Benedict’s contribution to contemporary rhetorical theory.

Being whole persons, body and soul made for love, humans are Dancing animals co-striking turns with (to and from) one another and the almighty Accepting then Inventing, responders encountering the gift of all creation Joined in communion by God’s divine grace Moved to love in feeling beloved And perfecting contact until all are one, all in all.126

notes

1. Richard Weaver, Th e Ethics of Rhetoric (1953; rpt. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1985), 26. 2. Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 81–82. 3. It is difficult to overstate the influence of John Paul II, both within the Church and worldwide. He published, travelled, and spoke more than any pope in history. His began with almost no delay, a rare move for a process that can take decades. Today he is unofficially called John Paul the Great. 4. Th e mass of commentary on this encyclical is formidable. John Paul II established a very public papacy and strong relations with the press, so a global network enabled Benedict’s “Love Letter” to spark a nearly instantaneous media reaction. In addition to coverage from every major news outlet worldwide, there were formal addresses and sermons from thousands within the Church hierarchy, including an entire volume of response essays from faculty at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. In an unprecedented move, Benedict published “explanatory” introductions to Deus Caritas Est online and in multiple magazines, and the Vatican sponsored a conference to coincide with the letter’s release. See Pope Benedict XVI, “I Wished to Show the Humanity of Faith” (address to the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum,” January 23, 2006) Zenit trans. http://zenit.org/article-15085?l=english; Pope Benedict XVI, “Th e Secret of Love” Famiglia Cristiana (February 5, 2006) Zenit trans. http://zenit.org/article-15211?l=english (accessed October 2011). Extended analyses and commentary from scholars from a variety of religions are still being published today. Th is letter touches many people and exercises enormous

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influence; it is a complex and global rhetorical event that is still unfolding. Substantive sources include John L. Allen, Jr., “Th e First Encyclical,” National Catholic Reporter 5:21 (January 27, 2006), http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/pfw012706. htm; Paul Josef Cardinal Cordes, “Jesus Shows God as He Who Loves” (Plenary Address to the Bishops of England and Wales, Leeds, UK, April 7, 2008), http://zenit. org/article-22486?l=english; Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, “Social Doctrine Lies at the Heart of Encyclical,” L’Osservatore Romano (May 13, 2006), Zenit trans. http://zenit.org/ article-16869?l=english; Stephen Crittenden, host, “Benedict Genius Est,” Th e Religion Report (Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National, February 1, 2006), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1558971.htm; J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., “Charity and Justice in the Relations among People and Nations” (Plenary address to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, April 27, 2007),http://zenit. org/article-19541?l=english; Cardinal Renato Martino, “Th e Universal Dimension of Social Charity,” L’Osservatore Romano (August 26, 2006), Zenit trans. http://zenit.org/ article-16809?l=english; Mark C. Mattes, “Delivering the Goods: A Radical Lutheran Response to Deus Caritas Est,” Journal of Lutheran Ethics 6:8 (2006), http://archive.elca. org/jle/article.asp?k=633; Livio Melina and Carl A. Anderson, eds., Th e Way of Love: Reflections on Pope Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006); John Milbank, “Th e Future of Love,” Second Spring, October 9, 2006, http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/milbank.htm; Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, “Philosophy behind Deus Caritas Est,” (February 15, 2006), Zenit trans. http://zenit. org/article-15295?l=english; George Weigel, “From to Deus Caritas Est” (Principal Address to the Acton Institute, Rome, December 12, 2006), http://www. eppc.org/publications/pubID.2788/pub_detail.asp (all accessed October 2011). 5. Th ere are three contemporary rhetorical critiques of papal encyclicals. Overall, “the rhetorical community has largely ignored papal discourse.” Dennis D. Cali, “Th e Posture of Presumption in John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor,” Journal of Communication and Religion 21 (1998): 48. See also Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Th e Metaphoric Cluster in the Rhetoric of Pope Paul VI and Edmund G. Brown Jr.,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 51–72, and “Interpretation of in the Conflict over Humanae Vitae,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 201–11. Cali’s statement is very strong. Papal discourse is far from the mainstream of our field, but several rhetoricians have contributed useful research and analyses. For good examples see Margaret B. Melady, Th e Rhetoric of Pope John Paul II: Th e Pastoral Visit as a New Vocabulary of the Sacred (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Pope John Paul II and the Crusade Against Communism: A Case Study in Secular and Sacred Time,” Rhetoric & Public Aff airs 4 (2001): 689–710; Joseph R. Blaney and Joseph P. Zompetti, eds., Th e Rhetoric of Pope John Paul II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).

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6. In terms of large-scale world politics, John Paul II’s role in the fall of communism is a marked example of the social impact of religious rhetoric. See Zagacki, “John Paul II and the Crusade Against Communism,” 689. For a recent example of the significance of religion for U.S. public aff airs, consider changes in the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. With the 2009 confirmation of Sonya Sotomayor, six justices are Catholics, an unprecedented majority for a traditionally Protestant court. See Barbara A. Perry, “Catholics and the Supreme Court: From the ‘Catholic Seat’ to the New Majority,” inCatholics and Politics: Th e Dynamic Tension between Faith and Power, ed. Kristin E. Heyer, Mark J. Rozell, and Michael A. Genovese (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 155. 7. Plato’s Apology is the most famous example of how mainstream Athenian culture saw the relationship between sophists and religion. Th e charges against Socrates are not unique, they are “the stock charges against any philosopher, that he teaches his pupils about things in the heavens and below the earth, and to disbelieve in gods, and to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger.” See Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Th e Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 9. 8. In general cultural terms, Benedict argues that extremist relativism is a consequence of our deconstruction of Enlightenment era givens, especially rationality. For an application to our recent academic context, see Stanley Fish, “All in the Game: One University, Under God?,” Th e Chronicle of Higher Education 51 (Jan. 7, 2005), C1. 9. “Th e postmodern turn in communication scholarship is reopening many neglected but promising research questions that modernists from John Locke forward have tended to reject. One of them is the ‘God-Problem,’ namely, how to consider the speech agency of God within human interaction.” Quentin Schultze, “Th e ‘God-Problem’ in Communication Studies,” Journal of Communication and Religion 28 (2005): 1. Also see “Special Issueon Religious and Th eological Traditions as Sources of Rhetorical Invention,” Rhetoric &Public Aff airs 7 (2004): 445–614. 10. Jeff rey B. Kurtz, “Intelligence Illuminated by Love: Faith, Learning, and the Stakes of Doing Rhetorical Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 426. Our era is misnamed “post-modern” until we can work past “pure secularism” into theories that can account for spiritual realities. 11. Linguistic abstraction is the impetus for Burke’s attention to embodied rhetoric. “For there is a sense in which all symbol systems are abstract, as contrasted with the here and now of direct physical contact.” Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 489. 12. “Th e challenge for rhetorical scholarship, in the tradition of Burke, Perelman, and Weaver, is to enhance our understanding of how various linguistic and discursive

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elements (e.g., specific words, lexical codes, syntactical patterns, argument strategies, narrative patterns) embody attitudes or tendencies and why diff erent elements are persuasive in particular situations.” James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric (Th ousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), 513. 13. For more on Plato’s use of rhetoric as a term, see Edward Schiappa, “Rhêtorikê: What’s in a Name? Toward a Revised History of Early Greek Rhetorical Th eory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 1–15. For more on Plato’s relation of rhetoric to love, see Albert William Levi, “Love, Rhetoric, and the Aristocratic Way of Life,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (1984): 189–208; and William G. Kelley, Jr., “Rhetoric as Seduction,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 69–80. 14. For a more complete picture of Platonic psychogogy, leading the soul, see his Republic (especially VII.517), where the enlightened return into the darkness to teach and help free their chained community. Hamilton and Cairns, eds., Collected Dialogues of Plato. 15. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds., Th e Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to Present (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2001), 84–85. Looking ahead, Benedict represents a Christian form of Platonism. Note the parallels in this passage from his influential “ at the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff ,”

All people want to leave a mark that lasts. But what remains? Money does not. Buildings do not, nor books. Aft er a certain amount of time, whether long or short, all these things disappear. Th e only thing that remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity. Th e fruit that remains, then, is that which we have sowed in human souls: love, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching the heart, words that open the soul to joy in the Lord. Let us, then, go to the Lord and pray to him, so that he may help us bear fruit that remains. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.

Joseph Ratzinger, “Homily at the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff ,” in Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches, ed. John F. Th ornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 24. 16. As a way of gauging the rhetorical tradition’s interest in love, consult the indices of historically comprehensive anthologies. Bizzell and Herzberg’s excellent collection, Th e Rhetorical Tradition, indexes only one love passage from their discussion of Plato (1658), and Hazard Adams’s critical theory anthology notes zero love references. Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Th eory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). 17. Th e feminist maxim “the personal is political” is a direct response to the hegemony that “rhetorics of the exterior” enjoy within Western culture. Public aff airs research is skewed when our understanding of rhetoric is limited by traditional Aristotelian

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assumptions about distance between subjects and the polus. Th omas Frentz has argued persuasively for our need to balance attention to rhetorical trajectories directed both inward and outward. “One approach [to rhetoric] moves outward toward the social world of public aff airs, the other inward toward the center of the human soul. If we trace the history of rhetoric closely, we find that the struggle between these two forms is resolved when the external visions come to dominate, misrepresent, and repress their interior counterparts. But if both visions are equally valued as alternative forms of the same art, then perhaps a more complete theory of rhetoric may be forthcoming.” Th omas S. Frentz, “Reconstructing a Rhetoric of the Interior,” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 83. 18. For more on the agon as the fundamental relationship of the West, see Deborah Tannen, Th e Argument Culture (New York: Random House, 1999). 19. “Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric.” Joshua Gunn, “For the Love of Rhetoric, with Continual References to Kenny and Dolly,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 131. 20. Weaver, Th e Ethics of Rhetoric, 17. 21. Weaver, Th e Ethics of Rhetoric, 15–16. 22. Weaver, Th e Ethics of Rhetoric, 17. 23. Wayne Brockriede, “Arguers as Lovers,” Philosophy and Rhetoric (1972): 1–11. 24. See also Evan Blythin, “‘Arguers as Lovers’: A Critical Perspective,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 12 (1979): 176–86. 25. Brockriede, “Arguers as Lovers,” 4. 26. Jim W. Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” in Professing the New Rhetorics, ed. Th eresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown (Englewood Cliff s, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 422–23. 27. Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” 423. 28. Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” 424. 29. “[L]ove has been avoided in theoretical discussions because it is already the assumed dynamic underwriting persuasion; love has been indirectly theorized already in terms of identification and the transcendent promise of unification. I [Gunn] suggest that this is demonstrable in the widely taught concepts of ‘identification,’ ‘division,’ and ‘consubstantiality’ derived from the work of Kenneth Burke. Th e dominant idea of persuasion as the creation of identification or other-knowledge over some common, shared substance is the implied love theory of rhetorical studies, and to theorize rhetoric’s love better I argue that we must reconceptualize identification as an iteration of love.” Gunn, “For the Love of Rhetoric,” 133. 30. Whereas identification compensating for division is Burke’s basic rhetorical dynamic, Gunn’s critique does not address consubstantiality as “acting together” or Burke’s other

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key rhetorical verb, “induce.” From a contact perspective, these alternate terms express key ideas on physical embodiment and communicative dance. See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 21–22, 41. 31. Gunn, “For the Love of Rhetoric,” 150. Lacan’s ontology inspires Gunn’s extensive use of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s forlorn duet “Islands in the Stream,” a geographic metaphor where subjects are static entities fundamentally divided. A contact perspective would instead point to the long tradition of poetry and popular songs celebrating the active truth of human contact as in “My Fist Your Face, Th at’s For Sure” (Aerosmith, Done With Mirrors, [Geff en, 1985]). 32. Gunn redefines love in self-sufficient terms because an atomistic ontology denies any need for the Other. When others (however noble, base, or neutral their motives) tell us that we do need each other, that we can complete one another and make a new whole, they are cast as fools because there is a preexistent “me” who is wise to the fallacy of “us.” Gunn is not so much advocating utilitarian love relationships as he is denying the possibility of consubstantiality. 33. Invitational rhetorical theory is predicated on a feminist critique of the agonistic assumptions underpinning the dominant Aristotelian-Ciceronian “conquest- conversion” tradition of oratory. As an aggressive masculine mode, it values winning over communicating and characterizes disagreements as battles where discursive might makes right and tactics are more about strategy than ethics. Following Gearhart and Johnson’s ideas on rhetorical subjectivity, an invitational mode does not seek to change the other because this is impossible: people make up their own minds. Instead of attempting to induce cooperation or make consubstantial, the rhetor invites audience transformation by creating a discursive environment conducive to self-change. See Sonja K. Foss and Karen A. Foss, Inviting Transformation (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994), 4–5. 34. From the perspective of embodied rhetoric, “invite” is a more discursive than bodily term. In contrast, Burke’s “induce” is a very bodily and unilateral act. For an audience, how might inducement feel? Reflexive and spasmodic? Certainly instrumental and not necessarily humane. See Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 43. Plato’s analogy between rhetoric and medicine has a similar bodily orientation; note how both inducing and medicating can bypass the auditor’s mind and spirit. See Plato, “Gorgias,” in Plato: Collected Dialogues, 465b. 35. Gunn, “For the Love of Rhetoric,” 148–49. Davis’s “nonappropriative relation” is especially relevant here. See Diane Davis, “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38 (2005): 191–212.

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36. Kenneth Burke, Th e Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 288–89. 37. Burke’s use of “strike” as attitudinal verb follows Augustine in grounding verbal meaning in contact: “he holds that the word verbum is derived from a verb meaning ‘to strike’ (a verberando)—and the notion fits in well with his references to the lash of God’s discipline.” Burke, Th e Rhetoric of Religion, 50. In a more positive yet equally physical sense, psychologist Eric Berne identifies “the stroke” as the basic communicative act: “Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse.” Eric Berne, Games People Play (New York: Ballantine, 1964), 15. For important recent work on embodiment in Burkean theory, see Debra Hawhee’s Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), where she explains how Burke “figures communication as haptic and bodily” (2). See also John Durham Peters’s “A Squeeze of the Hand,” in Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 263. 38. Max Weber, Th e Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 162. 39. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 162, 156. 40. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 164. 41. Benedict’s autobiography summarizes his life and work up until 1977. See Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998). 42. “Prior to his elevation, Joseph Ratzinger devoted a career of several decades to teaching, writing, and church administration, and the written output he produced is enormous. Books, essays, documents, sermons, talks, speeches, interviews—practically every form of nonfiction has been ground from his mill.” D. Vincent Twomey, “Preface,” in Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, ed. John F. Th ornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), xv. 43. Benedict’s respect for and continuity with John Paul II is clearly seen in the origin of Deus Caritas Est. Cardinal Cordes reports:

Th is rooting of the Church’s engagement in God was undoubtedly one of the deepest motivations that led Benedict XVI to write as his first official doctrinal work the Encyclical Deus Caritas Est. I do not need to repeat the surprising commentaries all over the world that accompanied the text—the fact that the “Panzer Cardinal” would choose “love” as the subject of his first major teaching. Perhaps the history of the text’s writing is less familiar to you. It shows clearly what was of most importance to the Pope. Since Cor Unum is directly concerned with the praxis of the Church’s love

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for our fellow human beings, Pope John Paul II had asked that I prepare for him a preliminary draft of a papal writing on charity. . . . Th e former Cardinal Ratzinger was aware of my writings. When he was elected Pope, he decided to publish an Encyclical on charity, but he totally reversed my intended order. His starting point is Revelation’s central message: “God is love.” He intitiates the Encyclical with a drumbeat, proclaiming the absolute precedence of Him “Who has first loved us” (1 JN 4:10), both in the order of time and in the scale of values.

Cordes, “Jesus Shows God as He Who Loves,” 7–8. Looking ahead, it is clear that John Paul II’s “Th eology of the Body” has influencedDeus Caritas Est. However, Benedict does not explicitly cite John Paul II on this doctrine. Instead the direct citations are limited to the practical directives of Part II, where he promotes his predecessor’s policies on Church-run and sponsored charities and outreach initiatives. See Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 71–76. 44. For an overview of Ratzinger’s Prefect period, see David Gibson, Th e Rule of Benedict (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2006), 6. 45. U.S. Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 46. Twomey, “Introduction,” in Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVII, xx. See also John L. Allen, Jr., Th e Rise of Benedict XVI (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 95. 47. For a characteristic example of this happily engaged debate style in public media, see “Th e Local Church and Th e Universal Church,” from the November 19, 2001, issue of America magazine. “Th e second reason why I finally decided to write is a pleasant one: Kasper’s response to my statements has led to clarifications. . . .” Ratzinger,Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 103. 48. Ratzinger, Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 162. 49. “Th ough Pope Benedict XVI is one of the most accomplished Roman Catholic theologians of his era, the aim of his pontificate is not the construction of a new ‘grand theory’ for Catholic theology. Neither is his goal to remake the Catholic Church according to the personal tastes and inclinations of Joseph Ratzinger. Instead, Benedict’s top priority is to reintroduce the fundamentals of the Christian gospel and of Catholic tradition to the modern world, striving to illustrate their coherence with the deepest truths of human existence.” John L. Allen, Jr., Ten Th ings Pope Benedict Wants You To Know (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 2007), 5. 50. Th e Vatican website categorizes papal discourse under eleven headings: Angelus/ Regina Coeli, Audiences, Apostolic Constitutions, Apostolic Exhortations, Apostolic Letters, Encyclical Letters, , Letters, Messages, Motu Proprio, and Speeches. Th ere is some overlap between less formal genres, but the quantity in all categories

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is substantial. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/index.htm (accessed October 2011). In his 1998 survey of modern encyclicals, Dennis Cali organizes the genre in terms of four nonexclusive rhetorical aims: popes generally make pleas for peace and unity, promote religious practice, commemorate events, and/or confront social and doctrinal trends (50). In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict’s aim has a grand global and divinely universal scope that unites all four goals. For him, the concrete reality of God’s love experienced via Jesus and Church as personal and historic events is the foundation of a religious practice that can and will unify humanity and overcome violent social and religious ideologies. 51. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 7. 52. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 7. 53. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 8. 54. Th is idea of responding to and accepting an encounter, where both God and humanity are persons or beings “through” and “for” others, represents Benedict’s and Christianity’s definition of subjectivity. Aidan Nichols explains that the

principle of “being for” expresses, Ratzinger goes on, the true basic law of Christian existence. Christian faith seeks the individual person; but it wants the individual person to be for the whole: for the glorification of God and the service of man in an inseparable combination. . . . But no account of salvation would be evangelical in which the principle of being-for was left without its complementary law, the “principle of excess.” . . . Only the lover can understand the “folly of a love to which prodigality is a law and excess alone sufficient.” . . . isTh principle of excess, which states the mode of the divine being-for in Christ, suggests a third ground-rule . . . For Christian faith, man comes to himself “not through what he does but through what he accepts.” Th is “primacy of acceptance” is what gives Christian ethics its basic character: vis-a-vis divine grace, human activity is only of penultimate importance, a discovery which brings in its train an inner liberation. We are freed to act responsibly yet in an “uncramped” way, putting our lives at the service of redemptive love. . . . the primacy of acceptance shows the instrinsic necessity of Christian positivity—in the special sense he has given that term. Because man does not create his identity, using his own resources, but receives it from outside him as a free gift , our relation with God “demands the positivity of what confronts us, of what comes to us as . . . something to be received.”

Aidan Nichols, Th e Th ought of Pope Benedict XVI (London: Burns and Oates, 2007), 90–91. 55. In his commentary on Introduction to Christianity, Nichols captures Benedict’s hermeneutic of Truth and Faith:

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Ratzinger sums up this biblical approach in the pair of terms “stand” and “understand,” with special reference to Isaiah 7, 9: “If you do not believe, then you will have no hold.” Essentially, this is a matter of “entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself and never could be made, and which, for that very reason, supports and renders possible all our making.” Th rough faith we acknowledge that a meaning adequate to making sense of experience can only be received. Like Raspe’s Baron Münchausen, we cannot pull ourselves out of the bog by getting hold of our own hair. In saying credo, we declare that in this world the receiving of meaning is prior to its making by man—though without denying the value of human creativity. So far from being irrational, faith is therefore a movement towards meaning and truth, towards the logos. . . . Yet though credo is a word in dialogue, a word addressed to a Th ou, the setting of the Creed is not a purely individual one, between God and the soul, but the corporate one of the Church’s life. . . . Christian belief is not an idea but life; it is not mind existing for itself, but incarnation, mind in the body of history and its “We.”

Nichols, Th e Th ought of Pope Benedict XVI, 76–77; citing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (Munich: Kosel-Verlag GmbH, 1969). 56. As a letter, Deus Caritas Est specifies all Catholics as addressees: “Th e Bishops, Priests, and , Men and Women Religious, and All the Lay Faithful” (3). Th is is the traditional audience for encyclicals, but it is a smaller audience than others addressed to “all people of good will.” Benedict makes a modest move here in that he is directly addressing Catholic believers as advanced students, but in a very public way so that the entire world can hear. 57. Benedict describes a “hermeneutic of faith, founded on faith’s internal logic. Ought not the fact to be obvious? Without faith, scripture itself is not scripture, but rather an ill-assorted ensemble of bits of literature that cannot claim any normative significance.” Ratzinger, Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 145–46. Also see the distinction between mystic and secular rhetorics in Ryan J. Stark, “Some Aspects of Christian Mystical Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Poetry,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 260–77. 58. Ratzinger, Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 258. 59. In this critique, the initial motive drives research question 3, “How can Benedict’s mode of contact inform contemporary rhetorical theory?” Of course, it presupposes Benedict has something valuable to share; the issue is how to share it with a secular academic field. A word or two about my own biases as a critic is appropriate here. I have a cultural and academic relationship with Catholicism but have not practiced since childhood, so this encyclical is tangentially addressed to me. I consider Deus Caritas Est a spiritual and rhetorical masterwork, but have serious questions about

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the function of heterosexuality in Benedict’s Eden interpretation (Part I) and his account of why the early Church abandoned radical communism (Part II). Th ese issues are important and may be taken up in future work, but in this essay I maintain a strong positive assessment of the encyclical’s value in advancing discussions of love, subjectivity, and ontology in contemporary rhetorical theory. 60. Belief is a key issue for all rhetorics, but it is an essential and defining element of religious rhetorics. For more on Benedict’s perspective, see “Doubt and Belief—Man’s Situation Before the Question of God,” in Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 39. 61. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 8–9. 62. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 9. 63. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 14. 64. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 14. 65. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 15–16. 66. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 17. 67. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 20. 68. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 18–19. 69. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 19. 70. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 20. 71. How fair and how pleasant you are, a love with delights! / Th is, your stature, is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like clusters [of dates]. / I said: Let me climb up the palm tree, let me seize its boughs, and let your breasts be now like / clusters of the vine and the fragrance of your countenance like [that of] apples. “Shir Hashirim, Song of Songs” 7:7–9, http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/ 16451 (accessed October 2011). 72. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 21. 73. For a classic example of the strong division between physical and spiritual loves in Christian history, see Anders Nygren’s , where he maintains that “nothing but that which bears the impress of Agape has a right to be called Christian love.” Nygren, Agape and Eros (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 92. 74. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 27. 75. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 29. 76. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 31. 77. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 34. 78. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 35. 79. Th e incarnate reality of God’s love in Jesus, his preaching, and the subsequent composition of the New Testament are major events that make Christianity a personal, historical, and dialogic tradition. Th ese patterns contrast with traditions like Islam

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that grow from directly uttered divine texts. Th e Koran is “the uncreated word of God, directly and unilaterally transmitted to a Messenger at a particular moment in time. In contrast, texts within the Judeo-Christian tradition, at whose center is revelation, cannot be reduced to a specific moment of divine intervention and as a result of which the Word of God entered the world; rather the Word enters human history continually, during and as part of that history.” Edward Said, “Th e World, the Text, and the Critic,” in Critical Th eory Since Plato, 1214. 80. See , where he explains, “In this Sacrament, the Lord truly becomes food for us, to satisfy our hunger for truth and freedom. Since only the truth can make us free (cf. Jn 8:32), Christ becomes for us the food of truth.” Benedict XVI, Th e Sacrament of Charity (Boston: Pauline Press, 2007), 1–2. 81. Th is move to define the structure of the Church, Ecclesiology, in terms of the Eucharist is a defining feature of Benedict’s perspective. Nichols explains that this influence, rooted in Augustine and de Lubac, is

the central motif of his own ecclesiology: for he is, along with Henri de Lubac, one of the first Catholic thinkers to adopt a full-scale, systematically elaborated, “eucharistic ecclesiology.” In the sacrament of the true sacrifice of Christians, lies the inner Leib-Christi-Sein of the holy, their existence as the body of Christ. And deepest, and most inwardly of all, then, lies the caritas which is the Spirit of Christ. Yet, as Ratzinger points out, here the most interior is also the most exterior, the most mystical the most ordinary. For charity is “the unity of the Church; and more, it is the real, sober, working love of the Christian heart. And that means that every act of genuine Christian love, every work of mercy is in a real and authentic sense sacrifice, a celebration of the one and only sacrificium christianorum.

Nichols, Th e Th ought of Pope Benedict XVI, 31–32. 82. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 36. 83. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 37. 84. In his lecture on the “Th eology of the Liturgy” Benedict explains Christian union in one body with more detail:

But how does this process that makes us become love and one single body with Christ, which makes us become one with God, take place? How does this abolition of diff erence happen? . . . In the Christian faith, which fulfills the faith of Abraham, union is seen in a completely diff erent way: it is the union of love, in which diff erences are not destroyed but are transformed in a higher union of those who love each other, just as it is found, as in an archetype, in the trinitarian union of God. Whereas, for example in Plotinus [and Burke], finitude is a falling away

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from unity, and so to speak of the kernel of sin and therefore at the same time of the kernel of all evil, the Christian faith sees finitude not as a negation but as a creation, the fruit of a divine will that creates a free partner, a creature who does not have to be destroyed but must be completed, must insert itself into the free act of love. Diff erence is not abolished, but becomes the means to a higher unity. Th is philosophy of liberty, which is at the basis of the Christian faith and diff erentiates it from the Asiatic religions, includes the possibility of the negative. Evil is not a mere falling away from being, but the consequence of a freedom used badly. Th e way of unity, the way of love, is then a way of conversion, a way of purification . . .

Ratzinger, Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 149. 85. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 39. 86. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 40. 87. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 40. 88. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 41–42. 89. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 43. 90. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 46–47. 91. Augustine’s deep influence on Benedict is especially clear here. For both authors, the Trinity is the model of human communication. Prior to the Fall communication was immediate, but when this communion was fractured distinct souls became challenged with negotiating together to improve an imperfect world, a difficult but essential and achievable goal. Th is telos or future-directed orientation toward improvement and change is a key Christian attitude imaged in God’s perfect tri-unity. In “Th e Trinity the True Object of Enjoyment” Augustine explains that

the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and each of these by Himself, is God, and at the same time they are all one God; and each of them by Himself is a complete substance, and yet they are all one substance. Th e Father is not the Son nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is not the Father nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is not the Father nor the Son: but the Father is only Father, the Son is only Son, and the Holy Spirit is only Holy Spirit. To all three belong the same eternity, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power. In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, in the Holy Spirit the harmony of unity and equality; and these three attributes are all one because of the Father, all equal because of the Son, and all harmonious because of the Holy Spirit.

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine I.5, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12021.htm (accessed October 2011). 92. Christianity’s “God in three persons” thus provides a profound dismissal of earthly

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categories. Aidan Nichols explains this aspect of Benedict’s faith in terms of balanced “complementarities”:

Th e positive significance of Trinitarian faith lies, first, in its construal of the unity and plurality of reality: “Th e Christian confession of faith in God as the Th ree-in-One, as him who is simultaneously the monas and the trias, absolute unity and fulness, signifies the conviction that divinity lies behind our categories of unity and plurality. Although to us, the non-divine, it is one and single, the one and only divine as opposed to all that is not divine, nevertheless in itself it is truly fulness and plurality, so that creaturely unity and plurality are both in the same degree copy and share of the divine.” Th is has the important consequence that the model of unity to which creatures should strive is not an “inflexible monotony” but the unity created by love, the “multi-unity which grows in love.” Second, Trinitarian faith confirms the insight that, in confessing the Absolute as personal, we are necessarily saying that It is not an “absolute singular.” Th e prepositional features of the Greek prosopôn and the Latin persona: pros, “towards,” and per, “through” already indicate relatedness, communicability, fruitfulness. “Th e unrelated, unrelatable, absolutely one could not be person.” Th ird, the Trinitarian dogma makes it clear that relation, which for Aristotle had been simply among the “accidents” or contingent circumstances of being, by contrast with “substance,” the sole sustaining form of the real, in fact stands beside substance as an “equally primordial form of being.” With this discovery, it became possible for man to surmount “objectifying thought:” a new plane of being came into view.

Nichols, Th e Th ought of Pope Benedict XVI, 83–84; citing Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity. 93. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 51–52. 94. Th is move marks a significant shift from scene to agent in the social encyclical subgenre. In his commentary on Part II Cardinal Cordes remarks:

When one delves into the details of this section [Part II], however, one discovers an important change of perspective. Namely, the Encyclical seems to present in this section a new message. Until now, the Church’s teaching on the struggle against misery—like the social encyclicals—dealt with public defects, goals and programs; they addressed factual problems and they insisted on concrete changes outside of oneself. Besides all this, Deus caritas est turns now decisively to commited persons: the Pope wishes to shape the life of the actors through a “formation of the heart” (n. 31a). So, for the first time, he formulates basic guidelines for a “spirituality” of those working in help-agencies.

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Cordes, “Jesus Shows God as He Who Loves,” 8. 95. Here Benedict’s ecclesiology is reminiscent of Augustine’s definition of a people as “the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” See Nichols, Th e Th ought of Pope Benedict XVI, 32. 96. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 53. 97. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 54–55. 98. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 59. 99. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 61. 100. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 64. 101. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 67. 102. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 68. 103. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 69. 104. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 70. 105. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 78. 106. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 79–80. 107. Th is “heartfelt” point is the key to Benedict’s view of change in rhetorical subjectivity. Note the “formation” terms in this passage:

love, the heart of sacrifice. . . . What, then, does sacrifice consist of? Not in destruction, not in this or that thing, but in the transformation of man. In the fact that he becomes himself conformed to God. He becomes conformed to God when he becomes love. “Th at is why true sacrifice is every work which allows us to unite ourselves to God in a holy fellowship,” as Augustine puts it. . . . And even more simply: “Th is sacrifice is ourselves,” or again: “Such is the Christian sacrifice: the multitude—a single body in Christ” ([City of God], X:6). Sacrifice consists then—we shall say it once more—in a process of transformation, in the conformity of man to God, in his theiosis, as the fathers would say. It consists, to express it in modern phraseology, in the abolition of diff erence—in the union between God and man, between God and creation: “God all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Ratzinger, Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 148–49. 108. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 81. 109. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 81. 110. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 87. 111. Here Benedict is responding to the gift as an obligation theme of postmodern deconstructionism. See Jacques Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 154. 112. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 88. 113. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 92.

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114. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 93. 115. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 95–96. 116. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 100. 117. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 101. 118. See Twomey, “Introduction,” in Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, xviii. 119. Benedict’s motto on his papal coat of arms is “co-workers of the truth” from the Th ird Letter of John. It is an exceptionally apt choice. As Robert Moynihan writes, “[I]t is a motto that sums up his life work: to speak the truth in love, in season and out of season, against opposition and incomprehension, with humility and courage.” Moynihan, Th e Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 38. Humility is the appropriate style for communicating Christian truth because it is not humanly created but divinely revealed. Here the Christian subject is both agent and agency. In aligning one’s purpose with divine purpose, the acting subject becomes a medium of divine radiance enabling others to see and feel the presence of God. In a 1993 interview with Moynihan, Ratzinger makes this point on the luminous ideal of Christian humility: “We are supposed to be the light of the world, and that means that we should allow the Lord to be seen through us. We do not wish to be seen ourselves, but wish for the Lord to be seen through us. It seems to me that this is the real meaning of the Gospel when it says ‘act in such a way that people who see you may see the work of God and praise God.’ Not that people may see the Christians but ‘by means of you, God.’ Th erefore, the person must not appear, but allow God to be seen through his person” (2). Th ere is also a parallel between Benedict’s “co-worker” stance and the Socratic “midwife” function in that they both take embodied and cooperative approaches to meaning. See Th eaetetus in Th e Collected Dialogues of Plato, 853. 120. “Propose” is an essential verb for love rhetorics, and it represents Benedict’s basic compositional mode for doctrine. In “On the Meaning of Faith,” he explains how his famous mentor, Hans Urs von Balthasar, taught him to avoid the dogmatic mode even in catechesis:

Balthasar replied by return mail on a correspondence card, as he always did, and aft er expressing his thanks, added a terse sentence that made an indelible impression on me: do not presuppose the faith but propose it. Th is was an imperative that hit home. . . . Faith is not maintained automatically. It is not a “finished business” that we can simply take for granted. eTh life of faith has to be constantly renewed. . . . Faith cannot be presupposed; it must be proposed. Th is is the purpose of the Catechism. It aims to propose the faith in its fullness and wealth, but also in its unity and simplicity.

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Ratzinger, Th e Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 211. 121. Th is focus on fundamentals may appear mundane, but in fact it is wholly novel. Deus Caritas Est is “the first doctrinal letter ever written specifically on the theme of love and charity.” Cordes, “Jesus Shows God as He Who Loves,” 4. See also Jerry Filteau, “Bishop Skylstad Calls New Encyclical ‘Profound,’” Catholic News Service (January 26, 2006), http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0600500.htm; Rocco Palmo, “Th e Surprising Message Behind ‘God Is Love,’” Beliefnet (February 2006), http://www. beliefnet.com/Faiths/Catholic/2006/02/Th e-Surprising-Message-Behind-God-Is-Love. aspx (accessed November 2011). 122. Encyclical letters are second only to “infallible” ex cathedra proclamations in their doctrinal significance, so historically encyclicals and even dogmatic theology as an entire genre have tended to come across as unilateral or “dogmatic.” Th is is the quality that Cali uses to sum up John Paul II’s rhetorical attitude in Veritatis Splendor. In the “Posture of Presumption,” Cali argues that “the problems of intelligibility and receptivity plaguing this encyclical derive, in large measure, from its argumentative modus operandi, which disposes it to a cheerless reception by popular audiences. Th e argumentative perspective John Paul assumes demands deference to claims that some readers, who find those claims antiquated, do not readily grant.” (49) In contrast, Benedict has adopted a tone of joyous proposal. Reuther explains that although he “does not show any soft ening of the views that underlay such warnings, he has chosen to almost entirely avoid the tone of admonition and rebuke.” Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Benedict XVI’s First Encyclical,” Conscience (June 22, 2006), http:// www.thefreelibrary.com/Conscience/2006/June/22-p5201 (accessed October 2011). 123. “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” Ratzinger, “Homily at the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff ,” 22. 124. It is not so much that discourse can fail to make contact (though it oft en does), it’s that any symbolic exchange happens at a remove through the instrumentality of a medium imposing a particular set of expressive strengths and repressive ineff abilities onto our ideas; the forms may or may not fit our occasions. Every symbolic instrumentality has its own special qualities: in sound, music expresses ideas about the flow of action and emotion; in stone, sculpture expresses ideas about mass in space. Language and especially prose, from at least the sentence level up to entire discourses, expresses conceptual predications, ontological ideas about what is. Just as certain feelings and ideas are not expressible (or best expressed) in music or sculpture, so are other ideas and feelings not predicable or best expressed in language. See Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953). 125. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 9.

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126. Th is is my recasting of Burke’s “Definition of Man,” as found in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 16. In a similar spirit, consider Burke’s parlor party hosting an unending dance or his barnyard as a scene for tragicomic animal choreography.

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This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 15:1, Spring 2012, published by Michigan State University Press.