Martyr of Love: Explorations of Christian Eloquence

In Rome, each time I have visited, I pay to walk among the ruins of the Forum. There is not much to it, and in the summer it is too hot and there are too many people. Yet I go anyway; it is my favorite place in that city. Strange, I understand, for, as I said, there is not much to it. Visiting the eternal city, if you skipped it, you would survive. But me, I always go; it fascinates me.

It is as Rose Macaulay said about ancient ruins: there is pleasure in them. “The human race is, and has always been, ruin-minded,” she wrote. Ruins are, she argued, an “eternal symbol” for the world-weariness, the yearning, the malaise, the nostalgia, the angst and sickness of the human soul.[1] They are fractured fragments of the whole, broken testaments of a whole beauty we cannot help but seek.[2] I think that is correct.

Maybe not for the modern tourist, the tourist who is but one customer among millions, that twentieth-century invention, doing things to do things and seeing things to see things. He or she, and I often count myself here, suffers from what Giorgio Agamben called the “destruction of experience.”[3] Robert Hughes called it the “itinerary of the mass tourist spectacle,” which signals a “kind of living death for high culture.”[4] If you have ever crammed into a hot museum, passively herded along a preset path with a thousand other people, you know what I mean.

What Agamben said was that when visiting “the great wonders of the world . . . the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should.”[5] What is absent from modern tourism, he argued, is immediacy, the reality of the world now encountered as ruins which one now visits as a ticketed tourist. The mystery, the narrative of the place, is no longer accessible as experience. It is not a quest that tourists are on, Agamben said, but something else. The ancients made their way to Rome for different reasons.

That is, when visiting the Roman Forum, or ruins like it, imagination is required, the sort of imagination that is not make-believe but rather mystical, the sort of imagination by which one comes to understand that one in fact belongs to the ruins one has come to see, that the story of the place is really one’s own. This is to make one’s way to Rome more like the ancients did, to experience the place, to be subject to it.

Which is more than simply knowing the history of a place. To imagine the triumph of Pompey, the violence of Clodius, the intrigue of that last scandalous Lupercalia just prior to Caesar’s assassination: all that history helps the place come alive, but I am talking about something in fact deeper, something which brings the pleasure of ancient ruins within our experience, seeing it as part of our fears and longings. I am talking about what Russell Kirk meant when he wrote, “Old Rome fell, but did not die.”

“All the way from the Roman Republic to the American Republic, a continuity runs,” Kirk wrote.[6] He borrowed Simone Weil’s image, talking about the “roots” of American order. He was certainly talking about history, knowing history; yet more importantly, he was talking about how one relates to history. He understood that America “participates” in civilization, and that if we are to continue the American project, our understanding of history must form our character and guide our thinking and our actions. And everything is at stake, he suggested:

Lacking a knowledge of how we arrived where we stand today, lacking that deeper love of country which is nurtured by a knowledge of the past, lacking the apprehension that we all take part in a great historical continuity—why, a people so deprived will not dare much, sacrifice much, or take long views. With them creature comforts will be everything; yet, historical consciousness wanting, in the long run they must lose their creature comforts too.[7]

Clearly, by now it is plain that I am talking about something like a secular communion with the past or at least a quite strong account of continuity. Which I guess could be described as a conservative position; one thinks here of some recent civic education projects or the past silly noms de plume of a few conservative thinkers. But that is not exclusively a conservative position. I am not talking here about what Laura K. Field calls, perhaps too reductively, an “Ideas First” approach that ignores the chaotic reality of history.[8] Hegel’s Geist comes closer to it, but that is getting too philosophical; I want to avoid that.

But this is where Cicero enters the discussion, today’s discussion; it is how he comes in, by means of the secular communion we share. That I should turn to Cicero is nothing special or new; if anything, it is predictable. Even Christians for centuries have learned from Cicero, sometimes feeling guilty doing so. Saint Jerome, for instance, famously dreamed that he would be judged and damned a Ciceronian and not a Christian; he was tormented by the “flame of conscience” thinking how much he had learned from him.[9] Saint Augustine called him the “founder of Roman eloquence;” yet he also said that although Cicero’s writing is to be admired, the inner spirit of his words is not.[10]

Nonetheless, they all continued to read him, to learn from him, to borrow and steal from him. And that, of course, is exactly what Cicero intended. It is why toward the end of his life, as Caesar was slowly killing the Republic, he took to writing philosophy. He wanted to hide something of value among the ruins of the Republic.[11]

Yet Cicero comes to mind these days not merely because of his traditional fame. Rather, it is also because of a growing fear many of us have that his time rhymes with ours. One should no doubt be careful with parallels and analogies; history can be blinding as well as illuminating. Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid making unnerving comparisons between the slow decay and final collapse of the Roman Republic and the cultural and political tensions and aberrations of our own day. Cicero, that is, haunts us these days like a warning ghost.

Consider the economic forces and class conflicts which slowly strangled republican Rome. It was a slow death. After the devastation of the Second Punic War, small farms were gradually replaced by large estates, managed and run by an increasing force of slave labor displacing free labor; here is the beginning of the tensions that would slowly come to blood in the failed reforms of the Gracchi.[12] These tensions were between rich and poor, the optimates and the populares, and they would in time render the whole body politic vulnerable to demagoguery. Enter here the great and fearful generals of the late Republic: Sulla, Pompey, Caesar.[13]

Add to this the moral decline which Cato the Elder early lamented and the rise of immoral men like Clodius; during the late Republic the mos maiorum was an ideal at the same time idolized and disregarded and twisted. The moral and religious frame of the Republic collapsed; words no longer meant what they used to mean. No one by Cicero’s time put much store anymore in the words of the Sibylline Books. Most saw right through the superstitions that had once held them all together; Roman religion had become a hollow thing, a sort of zombie religion. Yet they did not know what to do with their disenchantment.

And then there was the bad polity of the Republic. Executive power was too fragmented, too dispersed. It was chaos, too many checks and hardly any balance. Political forces at times were too conservative, too resistant to reform.[14] When the demagogues finally arrived on the scene, generals whose soldiers were loyal to them and not the people or the Senate, the frail Republican political order was incapable of withstanding the populism and gangsterism of the likes of Caesar. “For pity’s sake, what is this voluntary slavery?” Cicero asked his fellow senators.[15] Yet, by the time he asked the question, the Republic was already dead. As the historian F. R. Cowell put it, “It was Cicero’s fate to be on the bridge when the Republican ship of State went down to irretrievable ruin.”[16] There was nothing he could do. All that remained was the violent birth of the Augustan age which Cicero would not live to see.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe Cicero’s time does not rhyme with ours. Maybe it is just the media I consume. That is the problem living in a post-truth world: half of you will think me truthful and brave, the other half will consider me deluded. As Orwell said almost a century ago, “the very concept of truth is fading out of the world.”[17] What would he say now? Considering today’s technology, what Maria Ressa called the “silent nuclear holocaust in our information system,” how can we get together to make any kind of judgement?[18] I do not know. Anyway, I do not want to convince you that my fearful reading of Roman history is correct. I just want to suggest that it might be.

Which is why Cicero’s words sound like a warning, words Augustine quoted, words lamenting the moral and political decline of Rome. As he wrote in the Republic:

Long before living memory our ancestral way of life produced outstanding men, and those excellent men preserved the old way of life and the institutions of their forefathers. Our generation, however, after inheriting our political organization like a magnificent picture now fading with age, not only neglected to restore its original colors but did not even bother to ensure that it retained its basic form and, as it were, its faintest outlines.

We should note at this point that Cicero was a vain man, grotesque at times, an imperfect politician who did not win the games he played. Woven into these words are class insecurity, compromised principle, wounded pride, and an imaginary and political valorization of the past, a kind of rhetoric some of us recognize today. But still there is truth in it, the truth, as he said, that “it is not by some accident . . . that we are left with the name of the Republic, having long since lost its substance.”[19] That is, for all his vanity, Cicero was nonetheless right to see the collapse of the Republic as first a moral collapse.

But if our time might be like his, if ours also is an age of moral and political collapse, is it not best to find some escape? Would it not be better to get off the grid? Would it not be better to scorn all politicians and reject all politics, maybe contemplate God in peace in a cave? Cicero here says no; “let us hold that course which has always been followed by the best men, ignoring the bugle for retreat,” he wrote at the beginning of the Republic.[20] And this undoubtedly is right. But here also is precisely where Cicero’s moral imagination is most limited, and here is where, at least for Christians, Cicero offers a dangerous temptation.

In 46 BC Cicero wrote the dialogue Brutus, a long history of rhetoric. It was meant, against a revival of Atticism, to be a defense of his own oratorical style.[21] But it was also a defense of eloquence itself, a defense of its role in the Republic.

The Roman Forum was “robbed and bereft of that finished eloquence worthy of the ears of Rome or even of Greece,” Cicero says at the beginning of the dialogue. Which is a dangerous tragedy, he said, because eloquence is one of the “weapons which are the peculiar and proper resource of a leader in the commonwealth and of a civilized and law-abiding state.”[22] Good oratory mattered to the state, the kind of oratory that was comprised of both eloquence and wisdom. For Cicero rhetoric was a moral art; it mattered the kind of person the speaker was, ethos mattered. Cicero was of course simply following Aristotle here.[23]

Cicero had since his youth underlined rhetoric’s importance to the state, that wisdom without eloquence “does too little” and that “eloquence without wisdom . . . is never helpful.” Cicero long warned of the danger of immoral eloquence, the kind of eloquence bereft of wisdom, that it has the capacity to “corrupt cities and undermine the lives of men.” Such is why the study of philosophy is necessary, the kind of philosophical study that makes a person moral, because “whenever rash and audacious men had taken the helm of the ship of state great and disastrous wrecks occurred.”[24]

But how are we to assess Cicero’s appeal for eloquence and wisdom? Did it do him well? One could say it is what got him killed, especially his ruthless speeches against Mark Antony. His eloquence gave him as many enemies as friends. His last words to his executioner were, “at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” When his head and hands were taken back to the Forum, just before they were nailed to the Rostra, Antony’s wife, Fulvia, set his head in her lap and stuck hairpins in his tongue.[25] It was a grotesque and ignoble end but also a symbol of what was already true of Republican Rome, that it was doomed before Cicero ever opened his mouth. Even his most inspiring words were arguably only a eulogy. All his eloquence and wisdom were too little and too late.

So, what are we to do with Cicero’s call to eloquence? I ask this question as a Christian. The Catholic tradition would certainly take an Augustinian view that the Christian “makes use of earthly peace.”[26] And rhetorically that looks like the practice of bearing witness to the common good, at best avoiding the grotesque immoralities of culture wars and partisan politics. Thomas Bushlack’s Politics for a Pilgrim Church sketches out just such public rhetoric. Maintaining, he says, a proper distinction between nature and grace “provides the necessary tools for Christian engagement in public deliberation about the good with the kind of humility and solidarity that such a task requires.”[27] This, I take it, is a conventionally Catholic view.

But is that what comes to mind when we think of Christian rhetoric in today’s America? Do we, like Mary Ann Glendon, think of the luminaries of “the Forum and the tower,” people like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Eleanor Roosevelt?[28] Or do we more think of the “illiberal renaissance” which Laura K. Field tries to describe in her book Furious Minds?[29] Do we not think of Protestant Christian Nationalists and Catholic integralists? Do we not immediately think of podcasters and YouTubers? Do we not think of people like Bishop Barron and Taylor Marshall, Robert Jeffress, Paula White, Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon and Allie Beth Stuckey? Do we not think of the late Charlie Kirk and J. D. Vance? Do we also not think of the Christian voices of liberal resistance? Do we not think of people like James Martin, Shane Claiborne, Anne Lamott and others? Are any of these people good examples of Christian eloquence and wisdom? Are any of them the rightful Christian heirs of Cicero?

Or is the rhetorical task of the Christian not at all to seek cultural or political power but simply to offer the world “God’s faithful presence” embodied in the Church? This is James Davison Hunter’s argument. It is an argument like the one Jacques Ellul made decades ago.[30] Without giving in to what Hunter says is the perfectionism and escapist dualism of the neo-Anabaptist thinking of people like John Howard Yoder, he argues that genuine Christian rhetoric “begins when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, is embodied in us, is enacted through us.” That is how, more effectively, “trust is forged between the word spoken and the reality to which it speaks.”[31] That is, integrity is essential to Christian rhetoric, Hunter argues. Seeking to beat the world at its own Machiavellian game is impossible; it just makes Christians into hypocrites. It ruins evangelism. Better, Hunter says, to offer the world the simple gift of Christian presence. Such a position, however, assumes the good graces of a liberal political order, an assumption it might not be wise much longer to make as such order breaks down.

But again, is any of this truly Christian eloquence? That is precisely what I am not so sure of. Well-intentioned, well-produced, well-reasoned, theologically orthodox, today much of the “content” which Christians create across various media is certainly quite good on its own terms, but that alone does not make it Christian.

For it seems that whether it begins from a sophisticated distinction between nature and grace or a bad reading of Romans 13 or from the desire to remain a silent partner in the liberal order, the results are similar. The conclusion is that there is an idiom appropriate to the Christian that is not entirely Christian, that there is necessarily a Christian rhetoric that is not entirely kerygmatic. But is that right?

When Paul wrote to Christians in a Rome he could not possibly have imagined would ever become Christian, did he really mean what Luther meant when he spoke of the two kingdoms or what Catholic integralists mean when they talk about the two powers, spiritual and temporal? Or did Paul mean something else when he wrote, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another”? (Romans 13:8). Is it possible that Paul was simply offering the unconverted world not dialogue but instead only Christ, inviting the world to look upon the one who was pierced? (Zechariah 12:10; John 19:37). Is it possible that the eloquence recommended in the New Testament is something entirely unlike what we hear and see from most Christians in America today?

Because what we should say of Christian eloquence is that it is first charismatic. This is what Jesus said. Whatever the Christian is to say will be given by the Holy Spirit “in that hour,” that hour being the hour of persecution when “brother will deliver up brother” (Mark 13:11-12). And immediately we learn here something else, that Christian eloquence is not just charismatic but that it is also inseparable from sacrifice, Christ’s sacrifice and then our own.

What this looks like we see in Paul. To the Corinthians he said that God sent him to preach the Gospel “not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” It was the “demonstration of the Spirit and power” that mattered to Paul, not “lofty words of wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:17; 2:1-4). That does not mean that Paul disregarded the traditional elements of rhetoric, nor does it mean that we should. Yet it does repurpose it.

Christian eloquence is always a presentation of Christ, always kerygma; thus, it is always a presentation of Christ’s death and resurrection, always a presentation of sacrifice. As the Eucharist is always a proclamation of the Lord’s death, so too does Paul bear in his own body the marks of Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:26; Galatians 6:17). That finally is what Christian eloquence looks like, like life hidden with Christ in God, like an eloquence sometimes as silent as the Eucharist, an eloquence always open to suffering and even apparent defeat but which shows forth Christ (Colossians 3:3). Like Saint Blandina in Lyons, as she “hung on a post,” the text says that she “seemed to hang there in the form of a cross.” It says her fellow Christians “saw in the person of their sister him who was crucified for them.”[32]

That is, the perfection of Christian eloquence is martyrdom. At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, Saint Ignatius of Antioch begged the Christians there not to come to his defense. “For if you are silent about me, I am a word of God,” he wrote. But, Ignatius continued, “if you love my flesh, I shall again be only a voice.”[33] Eloquence in this instance meant offering no defense but instead accepting death. It meant leaving pagans to their illusions of triumph. It meant not speaking up so as win the earthly contest. It meant embracing the sacrificial silence of the Eucharist; or as Ignatius put, it meant offering one’s flesh to be ground into the “pure bread of Christ” by the teeth of lions.[34]

So finally, what should we say about Christian eloquence today? What rhetorically may we Christians offer the world? I do not exactly know. It is just that in times past Christians used to dream of becoming martyrs. When Saint Thérèse of Lisieux visited the Colosseum as a young girl, she kissed the ground and begged for the grace to become a martyr.[35] Today, more young Christians perhaps dream of becoming podcasters or of going into politics. That is telling. It is a symptom that something is not quite right. It belongs to the reason why so much Christian rhetoric today only adds to the noise of this foolish zero-sum game we have all decided to play in this country.

But again, what does Christian eloquence look like? Again, I do not exactly know. Saint Thérèse became a “martyr of love.”[36] She did not die exactly like the martyrs she revered. Maybe that is how we should proceed. Maybe we should simply beg for the grace to become martyrs but then just humbly live our Christian lives and speak truth in charity, but ready, like Paul, to fulfill in our bodies “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24). But our lives and our words should be lives and words open to suffering not lives and words that cause suffering, lives and words that prefer silence to the bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor and slander of the world. For these, the Scripture is clear, we Christians should put away from us (Ephesians 4:31). That is, if we are to follow the Lamb who, as he conquered, strangely opened not his mouth (Isaiah 53:7).