Divine Rhetoric : The Sermon on the Mount As Message and As Model in Augustine, Chrysostom, and Luther

St Vladimirs Seminary Pr, December 2000. Paper Back. New. Classical antiquity and early Christianity, for all their obvious differences, shared a love of the word -- a fascination and capacity for language that is, as Aristotle puts it, ''more characteristic of humans than is use of the Body.'' Organizing and relating material from over thirty years of study, Jaroslav Pelikan creates a stunning synthesis of divine rhetoric as exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount and interpreted by three titans of the Christian tradition: St. John Chrysostom (Greek and Orthodox), St. Augustine (Latin and Catholic) and Martin Luther (Protestant). By first discussing the basis for a Christian rhetoric, firmly rooted in the three classical ''genera of rhetorics'' -- deliberative, judicial and demonstrative -- Pelikan prepares the field for study, showing each rhetorician's concern for Christ's authority, audience and message. He seamlessly weaves these individual commentaries into a fabric of Christian rhetoric, using Aristotle's three proofs as loom: ethos (the moral character of the speaker), pathos (a paticular frame of mind) and logos (the message of the speech itself). The result is not only the illumination of language as persuasion, but also its participation in the acts of worship and prayer.