Melanchthon on Dialectic
Melanchthon, Philip. Translation and Introduction by Jeanne Fahnestock. Philip Melanchthon: The Dialectical Questions, Erotemata Dialectices (International Studies in the History of Rhetoric, Volume: 15). Leiden, Netherlands/Boston: Brill, 2021. 549 Pages. Cloth. $170.00. https://brill.com/display/title/60436
delay in publishing this review.
I understand that it is past due, compared to best practices.
While I am not a full-time book reviewer, my extensive experience and consistent record of high-quality reviews demonstrate my professionalism and expertise in this area.
Philip Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession in our Lutheran Confessions, Teacher of Germany, deserves a seat at the table in our classical Lutheran schools. To that end, there is a great need in translations of his textbooks. This is an important one.
The Dialectical Questions offers an English translation of the Erotemata Dialectices, the final and fullest textbook on the art of argumentation written by the reformer and educational innovator Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560). Representing an era when rhetoric and dialectic were seen as interdependent, companion arts, Melanchthon’s textbook was widely used in Protestant Latin schools and universities during the Reformation. The translation tracks revisions to the text across its lifetime editions (1547-1560) and traces its classical sources. The introduction chronicles the personal and political upheavals that Melanchthon experienced during its composition, and provides an overview of its rich and complex content. It then focuses on the unique feature that sets this work apart from other early modern dialectics: its many sample arguments drawn from medicine and natural philosophy (publisher's website).
This title has been very helpful to me in preparing classes for Wittenberg Academy in classical rhetoric, where we review dialectic and logic, teaching dialectic and rhetoric in parallel, as well as presentations for schools, educators, and conferences of the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education. It also helped me grow in my knowledge of classical content and pedagogy as revived and passed on at the time of the Lutheran Reformation.
After an extensive 145-page Introduction that puts the work in its proper context then and now, Melanchthon gets to speak for himself.
Dialectic is the art or way of teaching in a correct, clear, and orderly manner, which is done by correctly defining, dividing, and connecting true arguments, and unraveling and refuting the incoherent or false (149).
A footnote explains:
2 In dedicating Dialectic to teaching or explaining, Melanchthon in effect assigns it to the first of the three offices of rhetoric defined by Cicero, to teach, to move, and to persuade. He also aligns Dialectic with the fourth genus dicendi, the didactic genre that he added to the established three, forensic, deliberative, and epideictic (see also Institutiones Rhetorica 1521, Aiir; Elementorum Rhetorices 1539, 14-15). In his first rhetorical treatise, De Rhetorica Libri Tres, this fourth didactic or dialectical genus was a subdivision under the demonstrative genus (1519b, 12).
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.
What distinguishes dialectic and rhetoric?
Although some search for other differences, nevertheless this distinction is clear and true: they are neighboring arts, but Dialectic is concerned about all subject matters and it proposes the principal matters in the barest and most appropriate words. Nor does it paint one sententia [thought] with several words or with the added illuminations of figures. Rhetoric adds embellishment to these materials with a copia of eloquence that can illustrate with splendor and paint with variety. However not all subjects can receive this elegance of style. A geometer, for example, would be inept and ridiculous if, like a declaimer, he wanted to add rhetorical devices to his own demonstrations. And on many matters, when people should be enlightened, the propriety of dialectic is loved more than ambitious embellishment. But in moral matters, those illuminations [lumina] of words and figures dominate, by which the hearer is inspired and is detained in thinking about one sententia [thought] for a long time, or is even terrified and compelled by the lightning bolts of words.
In Cicero's Pro Milone, for example, with Dialectic it would be enough to say: Defense against obviously unjust violence is permitted by the law of nature; [but] Cicero embellishes this proposition with many words: It is therefore, Judges, not the written law, but the law produced by nature, which we do not merely accept, receive, and read, but rather we seize, we devour this truth from nature itself, etc.
This elegance of speaking is proper in rhetoric. Examples are obvious everywhere, but we will add one from the Psalm on peace: Behold how good. The proposition is that the peace of governments and agreement on propositions of true doctrine are salutary for the Church. And in the last verse the reason is added: because God helps the efforts for such agreement (152).
Melanchthon explains well how rhetoric and dialectic interact. Consider Richard Weaver’s take: “In the restored man dialectic and rhetoric will go along hand in hand as the regime of the human faculties intended that they should do. That is why the recovery of value and of community in our time calls for a restatement of the broadly cultural role of rhetoric.”
Here are the ending three paragraphs from The Cultural Role of Rhetoric:
The modern counterpart thinks he can affirm that creation is infinitely correctable because he believes only in man and speaks only on his behalf. When we examine his position, however, we find that he believes only in the natural order. This he reveals by his insistence upon positivistic proof for everything. But from the positive order he cannot draw the right inferences about man. He can find no place for those creations like affections and opinions which are distinctly human and which are part of the settlement of any culture. For him an opinion, instead of being a stage of historical consciousness which may reflect a perfectly bona fide if narrow experience, is just an impediment in the way of the facts. His dialectic would move towards the facts and seek to destroy that which holds the facts in a cohesive picture. On his principle a cohesive or systemized outlook must involve distortion, and this explains why he automatically refers to rhetoric as “propaganda.”
In brief the dialectician of our day has no adequate theory of man. Lacking such a theory, he of course cannot find a place for rhetoric, which is the most humanistic of all the disciplines. Rhetoric speaks to man in his whole being and out of his whole past and with reference to values which only a human being can intuit. The semanticists have in view only a denatured speech to suit a denatured man. Theirs is a major intellectual error, committed by supposing that they were going to help man by bringing language under the surveillance of science.
There is never any question that rhetoric ultimately will survive this scientistic attack. The pity is that the attacks should ever have been made at all since, proceeding from contempt for history and ignorance of the nature of man, they must produce confusion, skepticism, and inaction. In the restored man dialectic and rhetoric will go along hand in hand as the regime of the human faculties intended that they should do. That is why the recovery of value and of community in our time calls for a restatement of the broadly cultural role of rhetoric.
This is a text that could be profitably used as a textbook on dialectic today. I would love to do that and have already mined the text for insights.
The strength of this title is that it is finally available in English thanks to Brill as publisher and Fahnestock as translator.
The main weakness, honestly, is the price. At $172 a copy (hardcover or digital), it is cost-prohibitive for me to include it as an optional textbook for my high school rhetoric class. A paperback edition wouldn't wear as well. I encourage the publisher to consider lower price points. Rental copies wouldn't quite suit our needs, nor would mere excerpts.
There may be room in the market for another translation aimed at student use at an affordable cost. I was able to find copies of the original edition in Latin at books.google.com. I used my copy to double-check some sections of this translation.
Melanchthon later compromised in his later Loci on the causes of salvation and attempted to appease Calvinists with his revised Augustana, the Variata. Yet, I am still interested in reclaiming his three main texts on rhetoric, plus an additional workbook, if you will.
Translation work is needed on all to reclaim not only the secondary reteaching of his classical sources, but a primary Lutheran source, part of our untranslated heritage.
We thank the publisher for an opportunity to review this title thanks to a free hardcopy and a pdf while we waited for the arrival of the book.
Rev. Paul J Cain is Senior Pastor of Immanuel, Sheridan, Wyoming, Headmaster of Martin Luther Grammar School and Immanuel Academy, a permanent member of the Board of Directors of the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education, First Vice-President of the Wyoming District of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and Chairman of its Board of Directors, Rhetoric Teacher for Wittenberg Academy, a founding regent for Luther Classical College, a Director for Steadfast Lutherans and Associate Editor of Curriculum for Steadfast Press, a Director for Views on Learning, and Editor of Lutheran Book Review. He has served as an LCMS Circuit Visitor, District Worship Chairman, District Evangelism Chairman, District Education Chairman/NLSA Commissioner, and District Secretary. A graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Rev. Cain is a contributor to Lutheran Service Book, Lutheranism 101, the LSB Hymnal Companion hymn and liturgy volumes and the LSB Devotional Edition, is the author of 5 Things You Can Do to Make Our Congregation a Caring Church and articles in Concordia Pulpit Resources and The Lutheran Witness. He is a regular presenter at conferences of the CCLE and is an occasional guest on KFUO radio. He has previously served Emmanuel, Green River, WY and Trinity, Morrill, NE. Rev. Cain is married to Ann and loves reading and listening to, composing, teaching, and making music.
