A rhetorical ideal is an idea historically established in national culture of what a good speech should be. The rhetorical ideal has crystallized over centuries; it is socially determined and not without historical variability.

The signs of a rhetorical ideal are: a certain scheme for analyzing any statement, the appearance of the speaker, the speaker’s position on the “truth-false” dilemma, ethics and aesthetics of speech.

Antique rhetorical ideal(received the widest distribution): the purpose of rhetoric is to serve the good and happiness of people; rhetoric is not only a practice of communication, but also a science, a model of the ideal speaker is being developed: respectful attitude towards listeners Ancient Greek oral tradition and heroic epic were already laying the foundation for a maturing rhetorical ideal. For example, in Homer’s poems the speakers are presented - Menelaus, Odysseus, the texts of their speeches are given, the power of influence on people in moments of struggle, the choice of tragic and heroic moments in the lives of heroes, the vividness of the description of events are shown.

This rhetorical direction is called ancient, it is associated with the name of Homer. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle saw the goals of rhetoric and oratory in serving the good and happiness of people. The power of persuasion, as the main advantage of eloquence, is to understand what people’s happiness is and how to achieve it.

The ethics of the ancient ideal required addressing the listener with respect. Speech is a two-way process, the result depends on both sides.

The next feature of the ancient ideal is its attitude to truth. The largest speakers who belonged to this type of ethical position confirmed in practice the firmness of their convictions and their position - not to deviate from their understanding of the truth. With great attention to the logic of the text, preference was still given to the structure of linguistic forms, the contiguity of the choice of words, the use of expressive means of language, and the culture of speech.

Old Russian traditions (based on ancient Russian monuments): the speaker is a well-known person, endowed with the trust of the people, expresses a firm position, defends the truth; there is a high level of respect for the person giving the speech.

Modern science has a sufficient number of sources for studying the ancient Russian rhetorical ideal, mainly monuments of the 11th-12th centuries. and the beginning of the 13th century. Researchers rely on both folklore materials and works fiction, first of all - on the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, the chronicle.

The study of ancient Russian eloquence, its tradition in the 19th century. were engaged in A.S. Shishkov, A.V. Meshchersky, S.N. Glinka, N.F. Koshansky, H.P. Zelenetsky, F.I. Buslaev and others. In the 20th century. - OK. Graudina, G.L. Miskevich, V.I. Annushkin, A.K. Michalska. Characteristics of the Old Russian rhetorical ideal: The speaker is a well-known person, invested with the trust of the people: a church leader, a prince, a governor. The speaker's emotions control both faith and belief.

The speaker always expresses a firm position - these are mainly state interests, concern for the church and people. Speeches almost always contain a lesson or appeal, moral guidelines, and a positive example predominates.

The speaker defends the truth, his understanding of justice; Disputes and polemics are rare.

Much attention is paid to the ethics of communication: there is high respect for the person giving the speech. The speaker must hold his word high and speak only to an authoritative audience. The people express respect not only for the personality of the speaker, but also for the word itself, wise and beautiful.

The speaker carefully prepares for his speech. Their value is evidenced by the very fact of preserving speeches and their repeated copying.

The composition of speeches, messages, teachings is distinguished by clarity and clarity.

In the speeches of ancient orators, one is captivated by kindness, meekness and humility, gratitude, admiration for the beauty of the world, faith in the divine nature of wise and beautiful words, in the power and effectiveness of eloquence, and there is a high respect for book wisdom, teaching, and education.

In modern rhetoric identify the features that characterize the rhetorical ideal:
Modern rhetoric uses the following diagram analysis of any statements: who speaks? who is he talking to? under what circumstances; what does he say? For what? How does he express his thoughts? what is the result?

The appearance of the speaker is always important: what is most important in him - emotions or logic, correctness of speech or originality? Does the speaker have beliefs, and if so, what are they?
What is important is the position of the speaker or an entire social or ethnic group according to the “truth” – “false” scheme. Truth and lies are the most complex categories; in characterizing the rhetorical ideal, this is the most important criterion.

In understanding and assessing the rhetorical ideal, the ethics of speech are taken into account - for one community it is innate, deep, for another it is external, ostentatious, only to achieve the goal of the speaker.

FROM THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC

THE CONCEPT OF RHETORICAL IDEAL

The basis for studying the history of rhetoric and determining the stages of its development is the concept of the rhetorical ideal.

Rhetorical ideal- this is the “system of the most general requirements to speech and speech behavior, historically developed in a particular culture and reflecting the system of its values ​​- aesthetic and ethical (moral)" (A.K. Mikhalskaya).

The rhetorical ideal can also “be defined as an “image” or “sample” of good speech that exists in the mind of a rhetorician,” noted N.N. Kokhtev.

The rhetorical ideal, existing within one culture and historical era, is common to the bearers of this culture.

It is the conscious or unconscious comparison with the rhetorical ideal that determines the recipient’s assessment of the content literary text, i.e. the rhetorical ideal becomes a necessary criterion for this assessment. , The rhetorical ideal has three important properties:

Historical variability;

Cultural specificity;

Social characteristics.

The latter are understood as compliance with the value system adopted by society at a certain stage of its development.

2. THE EMERGENCE OF RHETORIC. ANCIENT RHETORIC

Many ancient works set forth a fable about the divine origin of rhetoric: Jupiter called Mercury to himself and ordered Rhetoric to be given to people. According to this myth, rhetoric is the beginning of human civilization.

The birth of rhetoric as a discipline (around the 5th century BC) is associated with the period of democracy in Athens. There are several main reasons for its appearance:

The social system in Ancient Greece was slave democracy. The People's Assembly was considered the supreme body of the state, to which political figure addressed directly during a public speech. To get attention masses/demos/, the speaker had to be educated, and his speech - logical, bright, convincing. In such a situation, the form of speech and the art of the speaker played, perhaps, no less a role than the content of the speech. “The power that Iron has in war, the word has in political life,” argued Demetrius of Faler, calling political eloquence and democracy the main sources of rhetoric;

The nature of Greek literature favored the emergence

oratory. Love to beautiful word, expressive speech, replete with various epithets, metaphors, comparisons, is noticeable already in the earliest works of Greek literature - in the Iliad and Odyssey. In the speeches pronounced by Homer's heroes, admiration for the word and its magical power is expressed. Thus, a word in ancient rhetoric is always “winged” and can strike like a “feathered arrow”;

Rhetoric in the ancient world was considered the highest level of education. In Greece, special schools of oratory were created, where experienced orators taught eloquence to young ones. Classes were conducted individually, should the teacher? was to correct speeches, teach how to write and pronounce them, work on the manner of performance, analyze exemplary performances; correct pronunciation errors;

In Ancient Greece, much attention was paid to the education of morality in students, and this education was carried out by a public speaker. The speaker had to be “kind” and have “spiritual virtues.” Education of a speaker ( talking man) went in parallel with the education of morality;

Greek legal proceedings played a significant role in the development of rhetoric as a discipline. In Ancient Greece, the trial took place in public. There were no prosecutors, and anyone could act as a prosecutor. The accused defended himself. He had to convince the judges and all listeners (and there were from several hundred to several thousand of them) of his innocence or present

Mitigating circumstances, otherwise he faced severe punishment: exile and sometimes death. Therefore, skillful speech was highly valued in the Greek polis (city-state);

In addition to political and judicial, laudatory eloquence (panegyric) also appeared in Ancient Greece. Typically, speakers gave laudatory speeches at festive occasions and forums. Often such speeches were the beginning of the path to political OLYMPUS.

Classical rhetoric of the 5th and 15th centuries; BC. combined not only information on philosophy, logic, grammar, literature, state law, jurisprudence, history, mathematics, and psychology. It reflected the life and culture of the ancient world. The oratory of that time included many innovations: symmetrically constructed phrases, sentences with the same endings, metaphors and comparisons; rhythmic division of speech and even rhyme. In the ancient world, the gift of oratory and its ability to influence the minds and hearts of people were highly valued. Rhetoric served as a kind of means that held together a single cultural space Greco-Latin world.

Sophist teachers.Sophist they call a person who knows how to hide the main thing behind the details, to prove with the help of various tricks (the truth of what corresponds to his goals, and not the truth. The popularity of sophist teachers was unusually great. They traveled all over Greece, speaking to listeners and helping those who wanted to master eloquence. To attract students, the sophists actively used manipulative techniques of exaggeration, for example, according to Isocrates, they promised to bring their students closer to the gods of Olympus. Sophistry(the judgments of these rhetoricians) were logically constructed correctly, but in essence did not correspond to the truth. With the help of the art of proving what is necessary, and not what is true, the sophists gained notoriety as “masters of verbal balancing act” (A.F. Losev). Let us give examples of sophisms.

1.Medicine is useful and a blessing.

1. The more good, the better.

2. Therefore, the more medicine, the better.

Sophistry is based on the fact that the word “good” in the case of medicine can be understood in two ways - as a remedy against disease and medicine as a product.

The main features of sophistry are:

Manipulation;

The focus of the dispute is to defeat the enemy;

Relativity - there is no truth, but there are different opinions, and it is only important to prove the correctness of your opinion.

It should be noted, however, that the role of the sophists in the history of rhetoric cannot be assessed as purely negative. It is impossible not to mention one very important circumstance, namely that they were, in fact, the first representatives of the intelligentsia not only in their country, but also in the history of mankind.

The most well-known representative there was sophistry Gorgias from Leontia. “He was the first to introduce into the type of education that prepares orators (special training) the ability to speak in the art, and he was the first to use tropes, metaphors, allegories, perverse combinations of words, the use of words in an improper sense, inversions, secondary doublings, repetitions” ( Isocrates).

The use of sophistry and verbal competitions was introduced Protagoras. Among his works are: “The Art of Arguing”, “On Struggle”, “On Science”, “Debate”. He was the first to explore methods of proof, the causes of logical errors, which only strengthened the position of the sophists.

But already in ancient times the words sophist, sophistry, sophistry acquired a negative evaluative value.

By the time of Socrates and Plato, the sophists discredited rhetoric by deliberately distorting the truth and defending murderers and swindlers for a fee. Therefore, Socrates and Plato enter into a fight with them.

Socrates. At the origins of European philosophical and rhetorical culture stood a man whose life and work had a colossal influence on the development of rhetoric. This was the greatest philosopher of antiquity, the teacher of the famous Plato - Socrates, who lived in Athens in 470-399. BC. Without leaving behind a single text written by himself, Socrates asserted a new approach to knowledge and generalization of reality in conversations with his students. Plato testifies to how Socrates’ word affected those around him: “When I listen to him, my heart beats much stronger than that of the raging Corybantes, and tears flow from my eyes from his speeches; the same thing, as I see, happens to many others,” says young Alcibiades. -...This Marsyas often brought me into such a state that it seemed to me that I could no longer live the way I was living... I am now experiencing the same thing as a person bitten by a viper... I was bitten harder than anyone else, and at the very sensitive place - in the heart, call it what you want, bitten and wounded by philosophical speeches, which bite into young and gifted souls stronger than a snake, and can force them to do and say anything they want” (Plato. Dialogue “Symposium”).

The art of eloquence is “a certain ability to captivate souls with words,” says Socrates in Plato’s dialogue “Phaedrus.” According to the philosopher, it is precisely this art that indicates the only true path to the impact on people. “Even he who knows the truth will not find a means of skillfully convincing besides me,” - this is how eloquence declares about himself in this dialogue. In Plato's Socratic dialogues, a new rhetorical ideal is realized and affirmed - to briefly ask a question, listen to the answer and, while talking, briefly answer the questions.

The rhetorical ideal of Socrates (Plato) defined as:

1. dialogical (not manipulating the addressee, but awakening his thoughts - this is the goal of verbal communication and the speaker’s activity);

2. harmonizing: the main goal of a conversation, argument, monologue is not victory or a struggle at all, but the unification of the efforts of the participants in communication for a common goal;

3. semantic - the purpose of a conversation between people, the purpose of speech is the search and discovery of meaning, truth, which is contained in the subject of speech (discussion) and can be discovered. (Yu.V. Rozhdestvensky).

Aristotle(384-322 BC) - ancient Greek philosopher, wrote the textbook “Rhetoric”, which has survived to this day. Aristotle's work consists of three parts.

Aristotle defined rhetoric "as the ability to find possible ways beliefs about everyone of this subject"/"Rhetoric"/. Aristotle formulated the basic laws of speech and correlated them with the rules of rhetoric. These laws sound like this:

Speech provides the state and its goals. Speeches can be divided into three types (deliberative, judicial, epideictic).

Every type of oratory represents the unity of ethos, pathos and logos.

Every type of oratory has its own relationship to reality and time.

Yu.V. Rozhdestvensky calls Aristotle’s first law “the law of community life,” the second “the law of the integrity of external and internal content,” and the third “the law of semantic limitation of speech.” Aristotle correlates the basic laws of rhetoric with rules (recommendations for oratory practice: how to begin an advisory or judicial role, what possible mistakes the speaker will admit, etc.). “Aristotle’s laws of speech are of fundamental importance,” notes Yu.V. Christmas. In addition to the laws of speech, Aristotle developed rules for constructing speech, the so-called “rhetorical canon”, which consists of five components: invention, arrangement, verbal expression, memorization and utterance. Aristotle considered knowledge of these five stages of the path from thought to word to be especially important for an orator. Aristotle pays great attention to the style of speech; he objects to confusion different styles in the speaker's speech. main idea Aristotle is that good style is an “appropriate” style. Aristotle was the first to draw attention to various types of speech that could not be called oratorical (according to Aristotle, these are everyday speech, educational speech, personal writing, learned treatise, poetic composition, etc.).

Aristotle's rhetorical ideal was similar to the ideal of Socrates and Plato and focused on the dialogical nature of communication, the ability of communicants to conduct a harmonizing dialogue and the maximum information content of communication.

Rhetoric of Ancient Rome. Ancient Rome, the conqueror of Greece, adopted both Hellenic culture and rhetorical traditions. In Roman society, oratory was extremely highly valued. According to Cicero, a person who mastered words was looked upon as a god. “There are two arts,” said Cicero, “that can place a person at the highest level of honor: one is the art of a commander, the other is the art of a good orator.” Having arisen on a national basis (the language of laws, debates in court, the Senate, the people's assembly), Roman eloquence developed and took shape under the influence of Greek oratory. Rhetoric was first studied in the schools of Greek rhetoricians, and in 173 and 161. BC. decrees were issued to expel Greek philosophers and rhetoricians from Rome. This did not help: a generation later in Rome, Greek rhetoricians again taught freely, and even Latin rhetoricians appeared, teaching in Latin and quite successfully reworking Greek rhetoric in relation to the requirements of Roman reality. Their lessons are more accessible and therefore more dangerous, so the Senate leaves the Greek rhetoricians alone and turns against the Latin ones: in 92, the best Senate orator Lucius Licinius Crassus (the future hero of Cicero’s dialogue “On the Orator”), in the position of censor, issues a decree on the closure of Latin rhetorical schools as institutions that do not meet Roman morals. This managed to temporarily put an end to the teaching of Latin rhetoric, but with all the greater zeal the Romans turned to the study of Greek rhetoric. Every day more and more young people left Rome for Greece to learn the Greek culture of words and thought from the best teachers.

Finally, between 86 and 82. BC. In Rome, the first anonymous textbook of rhetoric in Latin, “Rhetoric to Herennius,” which has come down to us, was distributed.

Rhetoric teachers in Ancient Rome devoted much more time than the Greeks to the form of speeches, the “flowers of eloquence,” often to the detriment of the semantic integrity and logic of speech. The Asian style of eloquence appeared. Moreover, according to Cicero, both types of Asian eloquence were represented in Roman rhetoric: the style of maxims, rhythmic witty sentences; and the style is pompous, when words strung together like beads create speech distinguished not by depth of thought, but by euphony. All poets and orators of Rome were “trained” in rhetorical schools. Rhetoric influenced the development of all types of literature, for example, the formation of the genre of the novel, which crowned the development of ancient literature.

Marcus Tulius Cicero was the largest representative of Roman classical eloquence, who achieved perfection in his person, and also embodied the interests of society in his speeches.

The main rhetorical works of Cicero are such works as “On the Orator”, “Brutus”, “Orator”; In them, Cicero preaches his ideal of an orator, a comprehensively educated person; knowledgeable in literature, history, philosophy, law. “A true speaker,” he says, “must research, re-listen, re-read, discuss, disassemble, try everything that a person encounters in life, since the speaker revolves in it, and it serves as material for him.”

The activity of the speaker, according to Cicero, is as follows:

Find something to say

Place what you found in order.

Confirm all this in memory,

Say it.

Cicero cared about observing the rules for preparing a speech, about knowledge of special rhetorical techniques and speech techniques. Cicero believed that the task of the orator includes:

Win over your listeners

State the essence of the matter,

Set up a controversial issue

Strengthen your position

Refute your opponent's opinion

In conclusion, add shine to your positions and weaken the opponent’s arguments.

Public speech should, according to Cicero, be skillfully decorated. He opposes scholasticism, poverty of language, and the verbal negligence of individual speakers.

Cicero considered rhetoric in unity with philosophy, believing that rhetoric included in people's lives through speech and are directly related to knowledge, and also connected the teaching of rhetoric with other academic disciplines.

What made up Cicero's rhetorical successes? Firstly, from good theoretical training: with his philosophical knowledge, he could talk about old subjects in a new way, striking the ears of a crowd not accustomed to broad views and judgments; and with his rhetorical knowledge, he was able to construct a speech more calculated, flexible and convincing than his rivals, for whom, after all, the hereditary tradition of Roman practical eloquence was always stronger than the theoretical lessons of Greek rhetoric.

Secondly, from artistic taste: before Cicero, the Latin language did not know stylistic development; in the language of orators, archaic expressions of ancient priests and legislators randomly coexisted with newfangled Greek words, everyday and colloquial expressions with solemn poetic sayings. Cicero was the first to bring this chaos to the unified stylistic norms of the spoken language of educated Roman society, streamlined, developed, enriched the means of oratory, forever becoming for posterity an example of that precious quality for the Orator, which the ancients called “abundance.” ».

Thirdly, from the ability to arouse passion in listeners: for us this ability does not seem important, but for the ancient orator, who so often had to combine logic with the power of emotion, this quality was the first key to success. Cicero here was an unsurpassed master, equally capable of eliciting laughter and tears from the public: his jokes enjoyed such fame that they were published in separate collections, and he aroused pity and hatred with such skill that when he had to share a defensive speech with other speakers (as was often done in Rome), the conclusion was unanimously left to his share - the most intense and passionate part of the speech.

Cicero's speeches combine semantic richness and logic of evidence with exquisite “flowers of eloquence” (tropes and figures). From the works of Cicero, 9 treatises on rhetoric, 58 political and judicial speeches, and 80 letters have reached us. In his works (especially in the “Three Treatises on Oratory”), Cicero fully presented the classical sections of rhetoric, predetermining the path from thought to word and called the “rhetorical canon”: invention, arrangement, expression, memorization, pronunciation.

Cicero's rhetorical ideal is admiration for the orator for the people, the orator - tribune. He devoted a lot of effort to working with beginning, young speakers. In his treatises / “On the Orator”, “The Orator”/ Cicero teaches, passionately preaches, gives numerous examples - all for the education of the “ideal” orator. The system of training young orators proposed by Cicero has been relevant for thousands of years in many countries of the world, and the very name of the Roman rhetorician has long become synonymous with the art of eloquence (“Speaks like Cicero” - this is how they speak with praise of someone’s successful public speaking). Let us present the components of the “ideal speaker” (according to Cicero) in the form of a diagram.

Related information.

Rhetoric and the origins of the European literary tradition Sergey Sergeevich Averintsev

Ancient rhetorical ideal and Renaissance culture

In his famous anti-Averroist pamphlet of 1367, “On the Ignorance of His Own and Many Others,” Petrarch discusses the question to what extent a Christian is allowed to be a “Ciceronian.” The word “Ciceronianus” was overshadowed by the reproachful words of Christ heard in a dream by Blessed Jerome nearly a thousand years earlier: “Ciceronianus es, non Christianus.”

“Of course,” Petrarch declares, “I am neither a Ciceronian nor a Platonist, but a Christian, for I have no doubt that Cicero himself would have become a Christian if he could have seen Christ or learned Christ’s teaching.”

The conditional mode of the unreal assumption (if only the pagan classic could recognize the teachings of Christ, he would become a Christian) prompts us to recall the words of the late medieval Mantuan sequence about the Apostle Paul: “Having been taken to the tomb of Maro, he shed over it a dew of compassionate tears: “What,” said he, “I would have done you if I had found you alive, O greatest of poets.” In general, the need to posthumously baptize ancient authors is characteristically medieval. Byzantine poet of the mid-11th century. John Mavropod, Metropolitan of the Euchaites, formally prayed in verse for the repose of the souls of Plato and Plutarch: “If You, my Christ, would deign to remove any pagans from Your condemnation,” his epigram reads in a literal translation, “take them out in my opinion.” at the request of Plato and Plutarch! After all, both of them, in word and character, came closest to Your laws.” An example was set in the patristic era. In the time of Jerome, Virgil was often called “a Christian without Christ” for his IV Eclogue, which, however, Jerome himself disapproved of. Augustine, in one of his epistles, reflected on whose souls, in addition to the Old Testament righteous, were brought out of hell by Christ - were they not the souls of the ancient pagans, especially those “who

I know and love them for their literary works, whom we honor because of their eloquence and wisdom”; True, he still considered it rash to answer this question (from a theological point of view, much more daring than the modus irrealis of Petrarch and the Mantuan sequence). And another parallel to Petrarch’s “if” is the words of Lactantius about Seneca the Younger: “Ots could become a true worshiper of God if someone showed him the way.” “Seneca is often ours,” Tertullian said, and the need to turn the unreal conditional period of Lactantius into a statement of fact gave rise, as is known, to the fictitious correspondence of the Roman Stoic with the Apostle Paul, already known to Jerome and popular in the Middle Ages.

What's new in Petrarch's words? Maybe it’s worth paying attention not to the statement itself, but to whom this statement refers to?

In fact, Plato and Plutarch, for whom Mavropod prayed, are philosophers, and strictly idealistic philosophers, with a strong mystical pathos. Plato taught contemplation of spiritual reality and, as it were, anticipated many features of medieval sacred authoritarianism - starting with the utopia of theocratic rule of “philosophers”, who resembled either Western doctors or Orthodox “elders”, to whom A.F. Losev likened them. Plutarch developed a mystical ontology in the dialogue “O E at Delphi” and demonology, which greatly influenced medieval ideas, in the dialogue “On the Demon of Socrates,” and in his moral doctrine he really “came closer to the laws of Christ.” Seneca, about whom Tertullian and Lactantius spoke, is a moralist, like Plutarch; restless and divided in himself, he was clearly looking for some new foundations of morality. Finally, Virgil, who in the IV Eclogue announced the birth of the world Savior and the beginning of a new cycle of time, is the most mystical of the Roman poets. But Petrarch was not talking about a philosopher, not about a moralist, not about a poet, but about an orator, a politician, a lawyer - a lawyer first of all (“or-timus omnium patronus”, “the most excellent general lawyer” - that’s what his contemporary Catullus called Cicero). In comparison with Plato and Plutarch, Seneca and Virgil, Cicero appears as a man completely “of this world”, without mystical depths, who can cause awe, but not reverence - just as reverence is not felt in himself.

This is how he was judged in quite different times. “As for Cicero,” notes Montaigne, “I am of the opinion that, if we do not talk about learning, his spirit was not distinguished by height.” And Lactantius, who owed much to Cicero in literary terms and who himself earned the nickname “Christian Cicero” from humanists, wrote:

“In his essay on duties, Cicero says that you should not harm anyone unless you yourself are hurt by an insult... Just as he himself practiced dog-biting eloquence, so he demanded that a person imitate dogs and snarl in response to an insult.”

The lawyerly, judicial eloquence of Cicero is a “dog” for Lactantius, because he is eager to bite the enemy; the pragmatic and everyday mediocrity of the moral position of the Roman orator, opposed to Christian ethical maximalism, is expressively connected precisely with the fact that he is an orator and lawyer. What else can you expect from a lawyer if not a down-to-earth way of thinking!

To this it can be objected that for the era of Petrarch, unlike the era of Montaigne, partly from Lactantius’s, and even more so from ours, Cicero was not so much a solicitor, not so much a lawyer and politician, in general, not so much himself, Cicero, as a mirror, in in which they contemplated the still inaccessible, but so attractive Plato. Already Lactantius calls Cicero “our first imitator of Plato”; but this still sounds not without irony. Less than a century after Lactantius, Augustine, despite all his brilliant education, was not inclined to read Greek and thereby anticipated the linguistic isolation of medieval Latin culture, turned to philosophical, and through them to religious interests under the influence of Cicero’s dialogue “Hortensius”; recalling this in his Confessions, he reproaches ordinary connoisseurs who praise Cicero’s language and do not notice his mind (pectus). “Plato is praised by the best authorities, Aristotle by the majority,” notes Petrarch, and in this context the “best authorities” (maiores) are primarily Cicero and Augustine. The cult of Cicero is taken from Petrarch in the same brackets as the cult of Plato and together with it is opposed to the cult of Aristotle - a combination so characteristic of the Renaissance as a whole and universal in its historical and cultural significance. So, let’s assume that Petrarch’s Cicero is “the first imitator of Plato,” the sage who led young Augustine to Neoplatonism, and ultimately to Christianity. Behind Petrarch are the authorities of Augustine and (with a reservation) Lactantius - again, a typical Renaissance appeal to patristics, that is, to Christian antiquity, against scholasticism. Everything seems to be falling into place.

However, with Cicero - the sage as a fact of Petrarch's consciousness - the situation is not so simple. To begin with, it was Petrarch in 1345, i.e. 22 years before writing the pamphlet “On the Ignorance of His Own and Many Others,” who opened the correspondence of Cicero in Verona and was amazed to see before him not a sage at all, but, as he put it he himself, “an eternally restless and anxious old man,” who “chose constant struggle and useless enmity as his destiny.” As for the authority of patristics, Lactantius, as Petrarch well knew, not only exposed Cicero in his insufficiently elevated approach to the problem of revenge and forgiveness. He, Lactantius, posed a question quite consonant with the criticism of Cicero as a thinker in new and modern times: the question of the seriousness or frivolity of Cicero’s attitude to philosophy as such. Lactantius's criticism begins from a comparison of two statements of the Roman orator. In the Tusculan Conversations, Cicero exclaims: “O philosophy, guide of life!” (“Ovitaephilosophiadux!”). But in one of his lost works it was said: “The dictates of philosophy must be known, but one must live according to civil custom (civiliter).” This transformation of the precepts of the “guide of life” into a subject of purely theoretical, purely intellectual awareness, not binding to anything, not interfering with living the same life as all other Roman citizens who are not philosophers live, evokes an energetic protest from Lactantius. “So, in your opinion, is philosophy exposed as foolish and futile?” If philosophy does not transform our way of living, it is not a matter of life, but literature, and there is no reason to call it a “guide of life.”

But the position of Cicero denounced by Lactantius is not a product of thoughtlessness, but rather a position that is thoughtful and consistent; its very inconsistency (inconstantia, as Lactantius puts it) is consistent in its own way. His philosophy is philosophy under the sign of rhetoric, as he himself quite expressively speaks of this through the lips of Crassus in Book III of his dialogue “On the Orator”:

“Philosophy is not like other sciences. In geometry, for example, or in music, what can a person who has not studied these sciences do? Just be silent so that he won’t be considered crazy. And philosophical questions are open to every insightful and sharp mind, able to find plausible answers to everything and present them in skillful and smooth speech. And here the most ordinary speaker, even not very educated, but with experience in speeches, will beat the philosophers with this simple experience of his and will not allow himself to be offended and despised. Well, if someday someone appears who can either, following the example of Aristotle, speak for and against any subject and, according to his instructions, compose two opposing speeches for every matter, or, following the example of Arcesilaus and Carneades, argue against any proposed topic, and if he combines oratorical experience and training with this scientific training, then this man will be a true orator, a perfect orator, the only orator worthy of this name.”

Cicero decisively annexes philosophy to rhetoric, subordinating it not so much to the professional needs of rhetoric as to the fundamental rhetorical attitude of the mind.

Therefore, it is so important that Petrarch, and after him the humanists, chose Cicero as their “leader,” patron and idol; that the question of Lactantius to Cicero is, in general, removed for them. They are within Cicero's position.

What does this position look like in a broad historical perspective, with an eye to the very antiquity about which humanists thought so much?

The Greeks created not only their own culture - specific, historically unique, with its own specific characteristics and local limitations; At the same time, in a dual creative process, they created a paradigm for culture in general. This paradigm, having renounced the Greek “soil” back in the Hellenistic era, and from the obligatory connection with the Greek language in Rome, remained significant for the Middle Ages, and for the Renaissance, and further, until the era of the industrial revolution.

Significant is not the same as unchanging. However, until the paradigm was abolished as a principle, all changes proceeded from it, were correlated, commensurate with it. We must clearly see the constant precisely in order to see the newness of the Renaissance.

The Greek paradigm has a very definite structure, and this structure is not similar to the image that stands behind the usual rubrication of our presentations of the general history of culture, including Greek, where “literature”, “art”, “philosophy” and “ science”, as points of a single questionnaire offered to different eras for completion.

What we call “culture”, the Greeks called ???????, actually “upbringing”, that which is transmitted and instilled in the child, ????. In the center??????? - two forces residing in constant conflict, but also in contact, in opposition, but also in mutual correlation: the education of thought and the education of words - philosophy seeking truth, and rhetoric seeking persuasiveness. They are closer to each other than we imagine: they have a common root in the archaic mental and verbal culture, and even in the phenomenon of sophistry they demonstrated an inseparable unity. That is why they constantly quarreled. Each of them sought to restore the inseparability of thought and word, truth and persuasiveness on its own basis, that is, to absorb its rival and absorb it into itself. Philosophy claimed that it was, along with all the others, “true” rhetoric: hence the rhetorical studies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists. Rhetoric claimed that it, and only it, is the “true” philosophy: we have already seen that for Cicero, a true orator and a true philosopher are one and the same, and among the representatives of the Greek “second sophistry” of the 2nd-4th centuries. we find many similar declarations. In other words, philosophy and rhetoric are not parts of the culture of the ancient type, not its “provinces” and “domains”, which could be demarcated and each could peacefully exist within its own boundaries, perhaps entering into light border disputes. No, the ancient type of culture gives both philosophy and rhetoric the opportunity to simply identify themselves with culture as a whole, to declare themselves the principle of culture. The face of culture is twofold: it is “paideia” under the sign of philosophy and “paideia” under the sign of rhetoric. Duality is inherent in the very basis of the cultural warehouse created by the Greeks and is reproduced along with this warehouse itself. The victory of “arts” over “authors” in the transition from the 12th to the 13th centuries, the revenge of “authors” in the speech of humanists against scholasticism, the dispute between Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro - all these complex events in the history of ideas, each of which has its own ideological content, fit into the framework of the old conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, although, of course, they cannot be reduced to this dispute.

So, philosophy and rhetoric are the very heart of culture of the ancient type, and in this heart lives a resurgent contradiction. But fine art, which for us is undoubtedly included in the concept of “spiritual culture,” the Greeks would have hesitated to include in the concept of their own. According to the well-known remark of Plutarch, not a single “capable” young man (“capable” of what? - of course, for activities in the sphere of mental and verbal culture or in the sphere of civil life), admiring the masterpieces of Phidias and Polykleitos, would himself want to be neither Phidias nor Polykleitos. It is curious that in Lucian’s autobiographical work “On Dreams, or the Life of Lucian” it is precisely personification that is contrasted??????????? ????? (“the craft of a sculptor”) - and ???????. The first refers in her speech to the names of Phidias and Polykleitos, Myron and Praxiteles; but only the second represents “culture” (in Lucian’s context, rhetorical culture).

It was at this point, as we know, that the Renaissance departed far from antiquity.

Even Petrarch thought in the ancient (and medieval) way: representatives of any “handicraft”, any ?????, “mechanici”, are excluded from culture, from the world where there are books. “What will happen,” he exclaims pathetically in the same pamphlet, “if people of manual labor (mechanici) take up their pens (calamos arripiunt)”? Every philosopher, every poet, every learned man must protest against such a terrifying prospect. Vestra res agitur!

To appreciate the revolution produced by the Renaissance, it is enough to compare the place occupied by Vitruvius - also a mechanicus who took up the pen! - in relation to the culture of his own time and in the culture of modern Europe from Alberti to Vignola and beyond.

The same is the contrast of tone in which the names of painters, sculptors and architects are introduced in ancient texts on the history of art - and, say, in Vasari (whose work in other respects provides a fairly close analogy to these texts). For example, Pliny the Elder, who speaks very respectfully of artists on an ancient scale, begins his biographical columns like this: “...At the ninetieth Olympiad lived Aglaophon, Kephisodorus, Friel, Evenor...”, “...The gates of art that were now open entered in the fourth year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, Zeuxis from Hercules ... "; “...His peers and rivals were Timanthos, Androcydes, Eupompus, Parrhasius...”; “...Parrhasius, born in Ephesus, did a lot there...” Pliny states that all painters who were, are and will be surpassed by Apelles, as well as all sculptors by Phidias; this seems to be said quite strongly, not without rhetorical pathos, but it only marks the superiority of a certain person in a certain type of activity, and in no way the superiority of this type of activity itself among others. The appearance of Apelles or Phidias is an event in the fate of art; It does not follow from anything that this is an event in the destinies of mankind. On the contrary, Vasari describes Michelangelo’s appearance not simply as a triumph of art, but as a reconciliation of heaven and earth, God and people: “The most benevolent Ruler of heaven turned His compassionate eyes to the earth.” This quasi-theological tone is very characteristic of Vasari: for example, Leonardo da Vinci was, in his words, “truly wonderful and heavenly (celeste).”

In this regard, the use of the epithet cfivinus “divine” is important. In ancient usage, this epithet was normally applied to famous masters of the art of speech. For Cicero, for example, Servilius Galba is “divine in speeches” (divinus homo in dicendo), and Crassus is even “god in speeches,” at least according to the judgment of Quintus Mucius Scaevola, one of the participants in the dialogue; Cicero pathetically recalls Crassus' last speech in the Senate as “the swan speech of the divine man” (cycnea divini hominis vox et oratio). The eloquence of Cicero himself is “divine” in Quintilian’s assessment; The irony of Cicero’s speech “In Defense of Ligarius” is especially “divine”; the same Quintilian speaks of the “divine splendor of Theophrastus’s speech.” The “divine” orator and the “divine” poet (the latter, for example, in Horace) stand next to the “divine” sage and the “divine” Caesar; but the “divine” artist next to them is invisible, he is not visible. Things would be different at the end of the Renaissance. Even during Michelangelo’s lifetime, everyone was so accustomed to calling him “divine” that Aretino can already play with this cliché in his well-known letter to Buonarotti dated November 1545, where, after a stream of reproaches and denunciatory hints, he suddenly conciliatoryly concludes: “I only wanted to show you that if you are “divine” (divino = di vino = “wine”), then I am not “watery” (d’acqua).”

The ancients wrote epigrams on works of art in abundance - but, as a rule, not on the artists themselves. In the “Palatine Anthology” there are 42 epigrams on Myron’s “Cow” and 13 epigrams on Praxiteles’ “Aphrodite Anadyomene” - but not a single epigram on Myron or Praxiteles! And now, during the Renaissance, Poliziano himself, the first poet of the Quattrocento, composes an epigram for Giotto’s tomb in Santa Maria del Fiore, beginning with the words:

Ille ego sum, per quem pictura extincta revixit...

(“I am the one through whom faded painting came to life”)

One must feel all the incomparable weight and solemnity of the Latin ille in order to appreciate such a beginning, which repeats at least two famous beginnings: firstly, the apocryphal, but at that time attributed to Virgil, lines that precede the Aeneid:

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena Carmen, et egressus silvis vidna coegi Ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,

Gratum opus agricolis...;

Secondly, initial words poetic autobiography of Ovid:

Che ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum...

A poet could talk about himself like that in ancient literature, but it was “out of rank” for an artist. Now the proud Ille ego is pronounced on behalf of the artist.

Here we have a chance to catch important detail: a lexical series applied since the Renaissance to artists, taken from the ancient practice of praising poets and especially rhetoricians. (For antiquity, a rhetorician is often superior to a poet: Cicero could have called poetry, in comparison with rhetoric, “a more lightweight form of verbal art”!) The opportunity to call himself “Ille ego” passes to the artist from the poet; the epithet “divine” comes to him primarily from the speaker. Without the “divine” Aelius Aristides and the “divine” Libanius, the “divine” Cicero and all the others, the “divine” Michelangelo would not have been possible. The deification of the rhetorician served as a primary precedent for the deification of the painter, sculptor, and architect.

In this regard, it is worth noting that the comparison of painting, sculpture and architecture with oratory was quite conscious and fundamental for the Renaissance. According to Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, “these two arts, eloquence and painting, love each other mutually.”

According to old memory, in obedience to the ancient tradition, the arts that deal with material objects and are therefore not “free” are subordinated to the “free” arts and, above all, to rhetoric. But this subordination is friendly, it preserves closeness, and the moment of intimacy more important than the moment subordination. “The arts that come closest to the free arts are painting, sculpture in stone and bronze, and architecture,” says Lorenzo Valla in the preface to his “Beauties of the Latin Language.”

The description of the internal division of the plastic arts is adapted, adapted to rhetorical schemes. In this sense, the remark of Ludovico Dolci, which already belonged to the post-Renaissance era (1557), is characteristic: “The entire sum of painting, in my judgment, is divided into three parts: Location, Drawing and Color (Invenzione, Disegno e Colorito).” One cannot help but remember that since ancient times the work of an orator has been divided into lnventio, dispositio et elocutio.

This convergence of manual art and rhetorical culture corresponded, as is known, to a new type of person specific to the Renaissance, who in his own person combined literature and the pursuit of painting, sculpture and architecture: the humanist as an artist and the artist as a humanist.

A classic example is Leon Battista Alberti, a man, as Vasari describes him, of “the most refined and excellent morals,” who “lived as befits a man of high society” (onoratamente e da gentiluomo) and mastered verbal culture (lettere).

Now let’s try to ask ourselves the question: where in the ancient tradition do we find an approximation to this, generally speaking, non-antique ideal of a sophisticated person, far from the “low” habits of a professional, living da gentiluomo, but at the same time able to do “everything” on his own; an adept of verbal and mental culture - and a jack of all trades (emphasis on the word “hands”)?

We find it in the region of so-called sophistry, that is, in that zone which is most obviously subject to the supremacy of rhetoric.

Apuleius, Roman sophist of the 2nd century. AD, praises Hippias, his Greek brother, who lived six centuries before him, because he, inferior to no one in eloquence (eloguentia), surpassed everyone in the variety of his skills and abilities (artium multitudine). He tells how Hippius once appeared at the Olympic Games in a magnificent outfit, made from start to finish with his own hands; and the Hellenes, who gathered from everywhere for the games, marveled at this, along with his learning and ornateness. The subject of amazement is the studia varia, the diversity of interests and activities of Hippias. Here is the prototype of the Renaissance uomo universelle. We will not find a closer prototype.

If any of the ancients spoke about the plastic arts in a serious and even enthusiastic tone, it was not the ancient philosopher, but the ancient sophist of the late era, a representative of the second sophistry. It is impossible to imagine, for example, that Aristotle, who seemed to write about everything in the world, would speak about sculpture and painting as he did about epic and tragedy in Poetics and about eloquence in Rhetoric. It is even more impossible to imagine some kind of ancient correspondence to Schelling’s “philosophy of art.” The highest and most significant thing that has been said in all of antiquity about a plastic masterpiece is the words of Dion Chrysostom, one of the founders of the second sophistry, about Phidias’ statue of Zeus. Here the artist is described as a teacher and educator of humanity, its “legislator,” and not only its delighter.

It is curious that the most expressive exception in the philosophical literature of antiquity is in Plotinus, by the way, a favorite of the Renaissance: this is his thesis about the intelligible example of the same Phidias Zeus. But something else is also curious: this thesis is found verbatim before Plotinus in philosophizing rhetoricians - Cicero and the same Dion.

The verbal and mental assimilation of the colossal phenomenon of ancient art took place to a large extent in the sphere of late antique rhetorical ekphrasis, which found so many echoes in the culture of the Renaissance.

Generally speaking, for antiquity, the above statement of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini about the mutual love of rhetoric and painting justifies itself. They were connected by: 1) status????? in contrast to ?????????, i.e., the attitude towards credibility, and 2) the moment of hedonism, so suspicious for all ancient philosophical thought, including even Epicureanism, which was concerned with the minimization of human needs.

Respect for the painter, sculptor, and architect as a “divine” person entered the structure of culture of the ancient type during the Renaissance, entered as something new, which did not exist before; but it entered through old door- the door of the rhetorical ideal.

Returning to the image of Hippias in Olympia, it should be noted that the ideal of the uomo universelle, so characteristic of the Renaissance (and slightly euphoric), a person who knows everything, can do everything, tries himself in everything - the ideal expressed in Pantagruel's training program - is rhetorical ideal. Philosophy knew, of course, the propaedeutic sciences: Plato forbade entry into the Academy to anyone who had not studied geometry. Philosophy could provide a methodological impulse and a program for collecting and processing facts in the most diverse fields of knowledge: this was the case with Aristotle and the Peripatetics. But the philosopher is almost the opposite of uomo universelle; his business is depth, not breadth: “much knowledge does not teach intelligence,” as Heraclitus said.

A rhetorician is a completely different matter. As Cicero energetically insists through the mouth of Crassus. For a rhetorician is an amateur in the highest sense of the word; his work is not “one”, but “all”, not self-concentration, but the self-development of the personality, not its systole, but its diastole.

When it comes to the Renaissance ideal of uomo universale, it is difficult to avoid such a topic as “the dignity and superiority of man,” dignitas et excelentia hominis. And here we can once again see how precisely rhetoric was the instrument through which the Renaissance defined and asserted itself in the face of the past.

Indeed, rhetoric is the art of praise and blasphemy, "encomia" and "psogosa"; such an approach to all things in the world is an integral feature of a rhetorician.

As you know, in 1195, Cardinal Lothair, the future Pope Innocent III, wrote a treatise “On the Misery of the Human Condition” - an ascetic work as opposed to the spirit of the Renaissance as anything can be opposite to it. However, Lothair intended and formally promised to write another work to encourage the humble - this time on the dignity of man. He did not have time to fulfill his promise: three years later he was elected pope, and he no longer had time for literary leisure. “On the Dignity and Superiority of Man” was written by other, completely different people - the humanists Gianozzo Manetti (1452) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1487).

Of course, even if Lothair had written a second treatise, he would have seen the dignity of man with completely different eyes than his historical opponents. It is also important, however, that in the rhetorical space “psogos” itself posits the possibility of “encomia”, “blasphemy” - the possibility of “praise”. Lothair created a “blasphemy to man”, Manetti and Mirandola - “a word of praise to man”: this is a very sharp ideological and general cultural contrast, but at the same time it is a movement that does not leave the same plane. The inversion of “blasphemy” easily gives “praise”; but, unfortunately, turning back 180° is also easy. “What a miracle of nature man is! - Hamlet exclaims in the second act. - How noble in mind! With what limitless abilities! How precise and amazing in appearance and movements! In actions how close to an angel! How close to God he is in his views! The beauty of the universe! The crown of all living things! What is this quintessence of dust to me?” “The beauty of the universe”, “the crown of all living things” - this is a normal topic of praise. “Quintessence of ashes” is a normal topic of rhetorical censure. Together they create a vicious circle.

Only Pascal, in his discussion of the greatness and insignificance of man as a single reality and a single theme for thought, breaks this circle and goes beyond the mechanical juxtaposition of “praise” and “blasphemy.” So it began new world, in which we still live.18. Painting, architecture and sculpture of the Renaissance. The largest painters of the Northern Renaissance The brightest page of the Italian Renaissance was the fine arts, especially painting and sculpture. Proto-Renaissance (XIII-early XIV centuries) – the threshold