Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome.

Frederick J. McGinness, Princeton University Press, $49.50, 337 pp.

McGinness studies this fertile period by a close focus on the preachers who exercised their rhetorical skills in the papal court. I say "rhetorical" because the humanist emphasis on the are rhetorica had made a profound mark on the sermonic culture of the time. The old medieval are predicandi as well as the late-medieval scholastic doctrinal sermon had given way to a sermon style which married the tropes of rhetoric to the militant theology derived from Trent and the Roman Catechism. The purpose of this preaching, however, was not so much instruction in doctrine as it was persuasion, moral change, and advancement in piety.

The inspiration behind this theory preaching was, of course, Saint Augustine's On Christian Doctrine in which the bishop of Hippo argued for the legitimacy of marrying pagan rhetoric to the exegesis and proclamation of the Scriptures. Augustine argued for the right to do this by telling his readers that the Children of Israel were allowed to take some Egyptian treasures with them when they went out into the desert. By extension, Christians were allowed some of the pagan rhetorical treasures to understand the Word of God.

In separate chapters McGinness reads the extant sermon literature and describes how these papal preachers (drawn both from the Roman colleges and the curias of the large religious orders) erected rhetorically charged sermonic visions of the church militant with the triumphant Christ at its apex as a mirror image of the Vicar of Christ who stood at the center of a "right thinking" and organically coherent Roman church. The total concept that emerges from this literature is a vision of a republica christiana in which the single parts of worship, governance, social activity, and intellectual inquiry interlock into a harmonious whole centered around the Chair of Peter.

Although the idealized picture of Rome and Romanita' may have been somewhat excessive, McGinness notes that the biting criticisms of Roman immorality, common enough in the earlier part of the century, now were replaced with great efforts of moral renewal as well as practical schemes to make Rome an exemplar of what the papal preachers set out in their sermons.

In passing, McGinness provides interesting information about, among other things, the shape of papal liturgies, educational ideals, the style in which sermons were actually delivered, and, alas too little, hints about how the rhetorical pictures of the sermons might have been replicated in some of the visual arts of the time.

This study is impressively researched (nearly half the book consists of notes and bibliographies) and very well written. I would especially recommend it to theologians. They will find descriptions of sermonic literature in it which, shorn of its tropes and conceits, hardened into the ecclesiology that was standard fare in scholastic manuals until the theological revolution started by Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac and others became crystallized into Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen gentium). While it is true, as McGinness is at pains to note, that the papal preachers in the seicento broke with the scholastic sermon when preaching before the pope, they were still hard at work on the manuals when they were in their rooms at the Collegio Romano and other centers of theological learning in the Eternal City. There is, in my estimation, more than an incidental connection between the concetto of the papal preacher and the ecclesiology produced, say, by someone like Robert Bellarmine.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.