Category: Quotation

saint augustine on posting

“The sin of the sophist is that he denies the necessity of subject matter and believes that forma alone is desirable. An opposite vice, one to which historians of rhetoric have never given a name, depends upon the belief that the man possessed of truth will ipso facto be able to communicate the truth to others. It is a dependence upon materia alone. Its chief proponent in ancient times was the young Plato, and it would seem fair to label it the “Platonic rhetorical heresy” just as we apply the term “sophistry” to its opposite theory. This is not to say that the ecclesiastical writers of the fourth century looked to the Gorgias and Protagoras for a theory of communication, but rather that their reactions to the pagan culture of Rome led many of them to take up a somewhat similar attitude toward the rhetoric which was a part of that culture. Augustine apparently recognized a danger in this aspect of the cultural debate of his times, and used the De Doctrina [Christiana’s fourth book] to urge a union of both matter and form in Christian preaching.

Only if one views the book as part of the great debate of the fourth century, therefore, does its historical importance emerge clearly. The reader is struck by the author’s insistence upon the folly of abandoning a useful tool to the enemy.”

—James J. Murphy, “The Debate about a Christian Rhetoric,” in The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo, eds. Enos, Thompson, et al. (2008)

r-nought literature

Say, Goddess, what causes, after so many centuries, brought forth among us this strange affliction. Did it reach our hemisphere, carried from the Western sea, after a select group of men set sail from Spain, braving the open waves and the unknown waters of changeful Ocean, as they searched for lands that lay in another world? For it is said that in those parts this pestilence reigns in every city with unending affliction, that it wanders abroad because of a perpetual flaw in the climate, sparing few people. Should we then believe that it was commerce that brought the disease to us, that, small at first, it gradually gained force and sustenance, spreading itself to every land? As when a spark happens to fall upon some dried twigs from a torch that a shepherd has forgotten in a field: at first it is little and appears to be biding its time; presently, as it gathers strength, it rises up and victoriously lays waste the harvest and the fields and the neighboring woods, tossing flames up to heaven. Far off some distant thicket, sacred to Jove, begins to roar, and for miles around the sky and the fields are aflame.

Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis (trans. J. Gardner), 1530

even journalists blame fact-checkers (1927)

For example, the problem of false news. How does so much of it get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don’t think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental, and credulous fellows—because nothing is easier than to fool them—because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands. The New York Times did not print all its famous blather and balderdash about Russia because the Hon. Mr. Ochs desired to deceive his customers, or because his slaves were in the pay of Russian reactionaries, but simply and solely because his slaves, facing the elemental professional problem of distinguishing between true and false, turned out to be incompetent. All around the borders of Russia sat propagandists hired to fool them. In many cases, I have no doubt, they detected that purpose, and foiled it; we only know what they printed, not what they threw into their wastebaskets. But in many other cases they succumbed easily, and even ridiculously, and the result was the vast mass of puerile rubbish that Mr. Lippmann later made a show of. In other words, the editors of the American newspaper most brilliantly distinguished above its fellows for its news-gathering enterprise turned out to be unequal to a job of news-gathering presenting special but surely not insuperable difficulties. It was not an ethical failure, but a purely technical failure.

H. L. Mencken, “Journalism in America,” Prejudices: Sixth Series (1927)