Magdalena Ryszka-Kurczab

The paper is devoted to a unique form of religious polemics, which in the Reformation period was a public religious dispute. The focus is on the disputes held in Vilnius in the second half of the 16th century. The paper introduces their history and uses their example to present the share that particular kind of dispute had in religious struggles; it was public and always carried out viva voce. The study also shows the inefficiency of the tool a dispute was, in the processes of building religious alliances. An example of using it fruitlessly and inopportunely in order to remove discrepancies between the views of Lutherans and Lithuanian Calvinists on the Eucharist can be the dispute held on 14 June 1585 in Vilnius by the then province governor of Vilnius, Krzysztof Radziwiłł nicknamed “Piorun” (Lightning).

In the 16th and 17th centuries, religious disputations became one of the means of conducting religious agitation. Texts providing an account of the course of such events confirm the application of the formal rules of school-type disputatio in public disputes using vernacular language. This undoubtedly resulted in the expansion of the audience at such spectacles beyond scholars conversant in Latin and influenced the change of the objectives of such debates, from a collective search for the truth to the defence of one’s own doctrine using all available methods, that is, dialectics and rhetoric.

Unlike mediaeval scholastic disputations, public disputes no longer engaged an arbiter to settle them. The victory was decided by the very course of the dialectic confrontation. As a matter of fact. The lack of an authoritative arbiter encouraged each of the parties involved to assure the public that they had won and therefore that their religious statements were true. After such a confrontation, ostensibly impartial and true accounts of the course of the dispute were published in print. This paper presents an analysis of eight prints providing detailed descriptions of six religious debates conducted in Polish between 1581—1599. These texts reaffirm the conviction (inherited from the Middle Ages) that the truth may be learnt through disputatio. They explicitly express the belief in the readers’ ability to individually assess the correctness of the arguments formulated and the counterarguments, and consequently to understand who is right. At the same time, noticeable techniques employed to authenticate the accounts as impartial and true dispiteously undermine the objectivity of the accounts that profess to be true. The discursive means employed to direct the reader in his reception of the conveyed message include a declaration of an ethical urge to proclaim the truth about the course of the debate and its winners, and concealment of the true authorship of the text with the aim of avoiding a charge of partiality, assuring that the account follows the pattern of the so-called autentyki (or originals), that is notes written down during the dispute.

Review

Marta Spranzi, The Art of Dialectic between Dialogue and Rhetoric. The Aristotelian Tradition, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company  2011

The following article presents the most important stages in the history of dialectic in the light of the changes of the topoi theory, from Aristotle’s Topics and Rhetoric, to Cicero’s Topica, Boethius’s tractates (In Ciceronis topica and De topicis differentiis) to the Medieval tradition. The author explains the most important shifts in the nature and function of loci between the 4th c. BC and the 16th c. AD, which allows a better understanding of the reasons of the fierce criticism of dialectic by Renaissance humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla or Rudolf Agricola, as well as the attempts they made to reform it.

Aristotle is considered the first creator of topoi that he discussed in the Topics and the second book of the Rhetoric. The right context for understanding the function of loci is a dialectical disputation with its specificity. It seems that for Aristotle topoi were sources of arguments as well as sources of argumentation premises. He acknowledged topos in at least two ways: as a strategy for finding an argument that allows to win a dialectical discussion and as a rule of inference.
For the later tradition of loci Cicero’s and Boethius’s commentaries on Topics were significant. Cicero wrote his Topica for a lawyer, Gaius Trebarius Testa, and ignored the context of dialectical disputation that was so important for Aristotle. For Cicero, topos (or locus) is the seat of arguments (sedes argumentorum). Referring to Aristotle’s division of rhetorical modes of persuasion, Cicero divided loci into intrinsic and extrinsic topics. Loci seem to work as pigeon holes, general headings under which one should look for arguments. Following the Stoics, Cicero considered dialectic and rhetoric to be two parts of the general science of logos. He also adopted the Stoics’ conception of dialectic as ars bene disserendi and divided it into two parts: the finding of arguments, i.e. ratio inveniendi (topike), and the judging of them (ratio iudicandi).
Boethius, a crucial figure in the history of dialectic as a translator of Aristotle’s Organon, abandoned Cicero’s definition of topos as the seat of arguments and adopted Themistius’ (an early commentator on Aristotle) understanding of locus as a tool for justifying inference. Moreover, he identified topics with propositiones maximae, which are universal and well-known propositions that ‘need no proof (probation), but rather themselves provide proof for things that are in doubt’. Loci are also understood by Boethius to be genera of these universal and undoubted propositions (so called differentiae) and to contain them.
According to Boethius, loci are principles of demonstration, they guarantee the validity of an argument. Such approach distinctly subordinates the art of inventing an argument (inventio) to the art of justifying its conclusion (iudicium). Medieval logicians, such as Abelard, Petrus Juliani, Albert the Great, William Sherwood or Lambert of Auxerre, adopted Boethius’ rather than Cicero’s or Aristotle’s approach to the loci.
It was not until the Renaissance humanists tried to change the state of the matters, that projects of “new dialectic” were created. Humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and Rudolf Argicola, aimed to rediscover the real meaning of Aristotle’s Topics and to broaden the way loci were used. Their efforts had a common source: the belief that scholastic dialectic was inadequate to what it was supposed to be in Aristotle’s view.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, religious disputations became one of the means of conducting religious agitation. Texts providing an account of the course of such events confirm the application of the formal rules of school-type disputatio in public disputes using vernacular language. This undoubtedly resulted in the expansion of the audience at such spectacles beyond scholars conversant in Latin and influenced the change of the objectives of such debates, from a collective search for the truth to the defence of one’s own doctrine using all available methods, that is, dialectics and rhetoric.

Unlike mediaeval scholastic disputations, public disputes no longer engaged an arbiter to settle them. The victory was decided by the very course of the dialectic confrontation. The lack of an authoritative arbiter encouraged each of the parties involved to assure the public that they had won and therefore that their religious statements were true. After such a confrontation, ostensibly impartial and true accounts of the course of the dispute were published in print. This paper presents an analysis of eight prints providing detailed descriptions of six religious debates conducted in Polish between 1581–1599. These texts reaffirm the conviction (inherited from the Middle Ages) that the truth may be learnt through disputatio. They explicitly express the belief in the readers’ ability to individually assess the correctness of the arguments formulated and the counterarguments, and consequently to understand who is right. At the same time, noticeable techniques employed to authenticate the accounts as impartial and true dispiteously undermine the objectivity of the accounts that profess to be true. The discursive means employed to direct the reader in his reception of the conveyed message include a declaration of an ethical urge to proclaim the truth about the course of the debate and its winners, and concealment of the true authorship of the text with the aim of avoiding a charge of partiality, assuring that the account follows the pattern of the so-called autentyki (or originals), that is notes written down during the dispute.