3. Rhetoric in Speech: words to move the emotions

Mediaeval education was thought of in two levels, the lower level as the crossing of three ways, trivium (from ’tres viæ’, hence ’trivial’, of lower importance), the higher a meeting or four ways, quadrivium. Trivium was the Gateway to Eloquence, the art of speaking well: today we might call them 'communication skills' - grammar, rhetoric and logic: quadrivium the gateway to wisdom - the 'mathematical arts' of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

These can also be seen as four branches of mathematics (Gk. mathematiké, knowledge, learning), concerned with measuring pure numbers, flat space on earth, the heavens and sounds.

In its turn the concept 'musica' in Latin was divided into three (a highly brain-friendly number of concepts as so many teachers have found):

• musica mundana, celestial harmony, the harmony of the spheres
• musica humana, human harmony, both within the person and between people
• musica instrumentalis, the music you hear with your ears which is made by an instrument (in the sense of something you use, the voice being considered as instrument).

From around 1400 people started digging up the original Greek and Roman statues and mozaics and vases and manuscripts, and rather suddenly everyone was writing classic Latin instead of the rather more human mediæval variety

(what's the difference? - in the middle ages you can meet such gems as 'wapentacum' for the Danelaw administrative area 'wapentake', 'lutestringus' for the punker who can't cope with 'chorda testitudinis', and instead of the classical 'felix domestica', we have 'cattus ignis' for the household or 'fireside' cat ...)

This rebirth of the classical experience is what the word 'Renaissance' refers to.

In today’s world, many people think of the ability to speak in public, and to do so in such as way as to move an audience, as a rather special skill, given only to a few. But in earlier times every educated person had developed his language- and communication-skills to a mastery of composing both verse and prose; and to performing - both reading poetry aloud and making a speech. Many of the tricks of everyday language were polished as rhetorical techniques - similes, metaphors, repetitions, living descriptions - and their use was firmly established as the basis for life at court, in the church and in academic circles.

’The Roman Empire became great because the Caesars were skilled orators’: and for renaissance writers, the model orators were Cicero, the Hitler of the ancient world, active in the power struggle around Julius Caesar, and Quintillianus, a 1st century Martin Luther King, and tutor to the Roman princes. When the Romans later adopted Christianity as the state religion, their language became the international language throughout the spiritual empire of the Roman Church, which, of course, reached places where the military of the Roman State never did; and the grammatical, poetical and rhetorical doctrine of Latin, for better or worse, became the model for all the western languages.

The pronunciation of Latin in each nation was characterised by its local mother tongue: but the Italian was considered the model to imitate.

'To all skills belong three things: Natura, Ars sive Doctrina, Excercitatio' - nature, knowledge and practice. Later authors taught that art - the application of human skill - must replace nature: but to the renaissance creator, art comes into the picture only at the point where nature is no longer adequate.

The emotions which rhetoric was used to arouse were also clearly recognised and even catalogued: some teachers said there were lots of them, Boëthius (c.500) reduced them to four:

• two positive: joy and sorrow
• two negative: hope and fear

  NB sorrow is seen as positive, because it leads to catharsis, healing through mourning; hope is seen as negative because it is based on uncertainty - to know is positive...

The emotions show themselves naturally and one notices their various signs, such as skin color, gestures, the voice’s melody or accent, rhythm, emphasis, etc.

The closer the performer imitates nature, the more he moves the emotions: a distinction is made between different styles, which are appropriate in different situations: decorum.
To begin with our model, eloquence, one way to consider speech is to distinguish between speech pure and simple, oratio pura, and its ornaments, ornamenta orationis. These are partly the figures of speech (metaphor, simile, exaggeration etc.), partly such aspects as form, appropriateness (decorum), and elegance: and the performer needs to recognise them, to be able to bring out their effect in performance.

Spoken rhetoric is far from dead, even in the busy modern world: if you listen to a spiritual leader, a leading actor, a persuasive politician - whatever the value of the content... : Ghandi, Lawrence Olivier, Margaret Thatcher... Or, most surprisingly, country singer Dolly Parton, who revealed the model for her stage shows - which come complete with surprise fireworks - as "Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, scare ’em to death, and go home!"

The fact that it has in later times become normal to consider rhetoric as ’empty’, is a result of its misuse and devaluation, rather than any reflection on its intrinsic value: nothing stops us reaping great benefit from using it in a sensible way today.