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Contact Rhetoric: Bodies and Love in Deus Caritas Est Jon P Seton Hall University From the SelectedWorks of Jon P. Radwan Spring 2012 Contact Rhetoric: Bodies and Love 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 Pope Benedict XVI’s inaugural encyclical Deus Caritas Est—God 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 gods have given man to express his soul, is a form of eros. 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 popes 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 solidarity, 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 theology 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 College of Cardinals 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 encyclicals, 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 philosophy, This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 15:1, Spring 2012, published by Michigan State University Press. Contact Rhetoric 43 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 Jesus—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 This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 15:1, Spring 2012, published by Michigan State University Press. 44 Rhetoric & Public Affairs 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 Plato’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.
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