Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal by Peter Auksi (review)

318 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 and the OED might merge. But Willinsky argues that citations continue to be taken from the writings of those with a vested interest in print culture, and that even the current coeditors (trained respectively in medieval studies and English literature, we are told) may yet perpetuate the idealism (and nationalism, sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism, albeit in postcolonial guise) that fuelled the first edition. He concludes with the provocation that the global disseminationbyOxford University Press ofthe English language might be considered as the longest and strongest legacy of empire. Should we consider the University of Waterloo, home of the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, and Don Mills, site of the compilation of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (of English, presumably), as the last outposts of colonialism? (CAROL PERCY) Peter Auksi. Christian Plain Style: The Evolution ofa Spiritual Ideal McGill-Queen's University Press. xii, 372 . $49.95 Auksi's study is admirable_ It fuses discursive grace with scholarly precision to assemble and gloss a definitive reference-anthology of loci communes from the major authorities who address dilemmas of conduct, particularly Christian conduct, as rhetorical issues. Auksi arranges his citations historically from classical through patristic, medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation sources, arguing the continuity of a tradition in which suspicion and anxiety about the distorting powers of eloquence transcend, and in some ways absorb, divisive anxieties of faith, reason, and sect. In pagan and Christian alike, from Plato to William Penn, they provoke a defensive, sometimes desperate and too often tmexamined demonization orsacrelization ofelocutio, the rhetorical offices ofstyle. Even its Reformation translators, for instance, left unchallenged the persistent topos of scripture as a 'plain/ transparent, tmadorned vehicle of truth. 'As a major component of Christian rhetorical theory,' Auksi argues, 'the plain style ... represents the point of fusion between scriptural tradition and the genus dicendi assumed from the classical tradition, now transfigured and redirected.' Unlike the 'low' alternative to 'high' and 'mediate' in Aristotle or Cicero, with their implication ofsocial class, 'plain' is always a eulogistic label in the Logos-driven and riven tradition of Christian polemics, dogmatics, and homiletics: a term at once aesthetic and doctrinal. Auksi's generous exemplificat~on, however, makes clear that 'plain' is anything but univocat or even stable. Is Paul the redeemed model to challenge Cicero? Ifso, what oithe elaborated pathos of the propheticbooks? What of Christ's parables, metaphors, and metalepses? Is the imitation of Christ and the Logos decorous conduct or blasphemous presumption? A clutch of reviewer's cullings can do scant justice to Auksi's richly detailed sequence: it certainly invests the evolutionary scenario of 'a HUMANITIES 319 spiritual ideal' announced in its subtitle. I would only suggest that, less advertently, Auksi's exemplifications, in their relentless preoccupations with the same topoi and paradoxes of style, uruesolved over a millermium, construct the etiology of a dissociated psyche with deep roots in Western culture. Rhetoric, 'the art of persuasion/ is itself one symptom of that dissociation , the product of estrangements and their concomitant desires (erotic, social, mystical): thus persuasion assumes as its condition that we are not 'of the same mind' with an estranged 'other' variously defined by sex, class, and order-of-being. Auksi's focus is the particular rhetoric responsive to lapsarian estrangement, the quest for suasive reunion with God,but thedynamics and paradoxes he explores are synecdochal exempla with wide resonance for students of literature, rhetorical theory, and the history of ideas, secular as well as spiritual. (MICHAEL DIXON) W. David Shaw. Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions Johns Hopkins University Press 1994. xii, 284. $39.95 Elegy and Paradox is not only about elegy but is itself, strange as it may seem, a kind of elegy. Written 'in memory of Douglas Bush ... and of Northrop Frye,' Shaw's brilliant study is, in effect, a memorial to a seemingly lost era of literary scholarship. In daring defiance of current critical orthodoxy, Shaw's relentlessly close reading is charged with a formalism so intense as to allow little space for questions of ideology and material history. Concern with such questions 'deflects attention,' writes Shaw, 'from aesthetic and experienced-based responses to the work of art.' And these...