Luther's Rhetoric: Strategies and Style from the Invocavit Sermons.

Neil R. Leroux. Luther's Rhetoric: Strategies and Style from the Invocavit Sermons.

St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002. Pbk. 240 pp. index. append. bibl. $24.99. ISBN: 0-7586-002-X.

Probably in no century was preaching such a force for change as in the sixteenth century. The Reformation flew on the wings of the printing press, but it flew just as effectively and perhaps more pervasively on words thundered from the pulpit. Luther was an extraordinarily talented practitioner in both media. Although in the past several decades we have had a number of excellent studies about the relationship between the Reformation and the press in which Luther of course played a pivotal role, we have not had the same benefit for his preaching. There have been a few helpful studies in both German and English, of which Leroux takes due note, but the field is still largely untilled. Leroux has set his hand to the plow. In so doing he has made a helpful contribution, even though it is a contribution that may be of less interest to Renaissance scholars than the title might seem to promise.

Leroux is admirably clear as to his purpose and method. He has a fine grasp of both classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, but he makes use of them in a creative way to "open up Luther's discourse to reveal a preacher (rhetor) engaging an audience" (12). What he tries to do, in other words, is to analyze eight of Luther's sermons to discover his techniques for making the audience identify with him and his message, which entails almost a line-by-line analysis of usage and syntax--all the elements that work together to result in a style. The analysis constitutes the core of the book, four of the seven chapters. I do not know of a similarly detailed study for any preacher, and in that regard, even though slugging through those chapters can be tedious, Leroux provides us with a model of how to do it.

In the first chapter of the book he lays out the principles that guide his approach and describes his instruments of analysis. He is in large measure dependent upon The New Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca, as well as Kenneth Burke's older collection of essays, Counter-Statement. He is looking for what "hooks and holds" an audience, and, like Burke, he is rightly convinced that the audience gets hooked less from the message itself than from the form in which it is delivered. Nonetheless, he insists form and content are inextricably linked and cannot be considered independently. He is right on when he quotes Donald Bryant: "style is the final elaboration of meaning" (29).

From Burke he borrows the useful categories of syllogistic progression of discourse and repetitive form. From Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca he borrows their focus on the means of obtaining "the adherence of the audience" (29). Among the means Leroux highlights is pronoun usage--how much can be accomplished by seemingly simple shifts from "I" to "you" to "we," and then back again! As he illustrates in his analysis of the sermons, Luther was in this regard as well as others a master. Just how much of the mastery was due to a self-conscious adaptation of rhetorical principles as laid out in treatises on the subject remains an open question, and Leroux's assertion that Luther was "thoroughly trained" in the art of rhetoric goes too far (1). From all the evidence we have, however, Luther in any case knew how "to hook and hold" an audience and win it to his position.

Leroux proposes "three operations for securing adherence" (30). The first is focus. The speaker directs the audience's attention to one issue, blocks out others, and in general takes charge of the agenda. It is "the first means of controlling the perceptions and expectations of the audience" (30). The second is presence, which is rendering the subject more impressive, more important, more vital, more urgent to the audience. The third is communion, the establishment of a bond between speaker and audience. Here humor, hyperbole, folksy maxims, rhetorical questions and similar devices are especially useful. "These three functional categories constitute a systematic attempt to unwrap the discourse" (31), and Leroux uses them judiciously in his unwrapping of the eight sermons. The categories, you will note, can be correlated to principles in classical rhetoric.

The second chapter is a straightforward mise en scene, the difficult historical situation in Wittenberg in 1522 sparked by Luther's controversy with Karlstadt over images, the cup, and other matters. The final chapter is a summary and an assessment of the import of the sermons. Leroux and his publisher are to be congratulated for including as an appendix the full text of the sermons, which run to less than twenty pages.

As indicated, I suspect the book will be less attractive to Renaissance than to Reformation scholars because Leroux's categories of analysis are not drawn from the classical treatises. Although Leroux knows the treatises, he moves his book in a different yet fruitful direction. But this is not the "rhetoric" of Aristotle or Quintilian except in a broad sense. I think a case can be made for classifying these "sermons" as, wittingly or more probably unwittingly, a form of the classical contio. Leroux, I suspect, might agree with me, but he to good effect does not pursue such categories in his book.

JOHN W. O'MALLEY

Weston Jesuit School of Theology