Functions of style in St. Augustine’s Christian rhetoric
Affiliations
Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania
History
Received December 16, 2014
Accepted January 4, 2015
Published January 13, 2015
Key words
Abstract
The spread of Christianity determined major cultural changes all over Europe as well as in the entire world. Without further dwelling on the relationships between the new religion and the classical culture, we will show that, in the art of eloquence, the perspective of the fathers of the Christian Church favoured, on the one hand, the survival of some of the Ancient rhetorical works and led to the introduction of a religious rhetoric that gradually departed from the influence of the old models, on the other. This paper aims at synthetically and systematically describing St. Augustine's view on the importance and functions of elocution, in order to reveal the innovations brought by this scholar to the classical rhetorical canon.
Copyright
© 2015 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.