Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies ed. by Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton (review)

A few years ago a group of scholars and teachers, members of the Jesuit Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, confident that their special gift—a theory of reading, writing, and speaking called "Jesuit Rhetoric"—is fundamental to higher education, as a sort intellectual gospel, held that it should be reinforced and spread. The result is Traditions of Eloquence, a 444-page treasure, in which thirty-five scholars (including three Jesuits) from sixteen Catholic and eleven secular universities record the history of Jesuit teaching tactics, as they adapted their application without compromising the principles Jesuits stressed in the 1540s. The book argues that eloquentia perfecta (rhetoric) can "overcome the scattered, dispersed curriculum that characterizes so much contemporary education."

At the heart of Jesuit education, historian John O'Malley, S.J., reminds us in the foreword, is its direction toward the common weal. As Cicero said in De Officiis: "We are not born for ourselves alone … but for the sake of other human beings, that we might be able mutually to help one another." O'Malley sets a tone for the whole volume that many of the contributors share: a speaker's words must be consistent with his behavior. "The good speaker, the good practitioner of rhetoric, the good leader has to be a good person."

In an introductory essay, Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton trace Jesuit history from the Society's founding in 1540, the Jesuit use of emotion and imagination in preaching, their missionary travels to China, the role of classroom competition, the suppression and return, and their current influence. Along with fifty members of the 114th Congress, they list thirty prominent entertainers, journalists, judges, politicians, and theologians, including Charles Osgood, Bill Clinton, Tip O'Neill, Teilhard de Chardin, and Pope Francis as "Jesuit trained."

In Steven Mailloux's essay, I was delighted to be reintroduced to Father Francis Finn's turn-of-the-century novels for teenagers, Tom Playfair and Harry Dee, among the first books I ever read. Their boarding school teacher is a young Jesuit scholastic who is "the most wonderful man they ever met." When he warms up to a subject, he becomes really eloquent. "His timidity goes, his eyes flash and he talks like an orator. He's a poet too." Clearly a role model for young boys like me.

In the essays of Patricia Bizzell and Katherine H. Adams, perhaps the most influential spirit in the anthology is Father Francis P. Donnelly, s.J., who published influential books like the two-volume Model English (1920) and others on both writing and speaking through the 1920s and 1930s. "Art is doing and you learn to do by doing," he said. Students should start writing on their first day in kindergarten and keep writing until graduation. Donnelley's basic method was imitation. We used Model English, at St. Joe's Prep, in which we observed how a writer describes a boat race, for example, and then we students applied similar imagery to another event, e.g., a track meet. When I entered the Jesuit novitiate at St. Andrew on Hudson in 1957, there was the famous Father Donnelly in person, in the infirmary where he would die at 87.

An essay which in structure and in spirit represents the main themes of the book is David Leigh, S.J.'s on "The Changing Practice of Liberal Education and Rhetoric in Jesuit Education, 1600–2000." He builds his presentation around three scenarios from the past: a Jesuit college run by the Ratio (rule book) in Italy in the late sixteenth century; in France in the eighteenth century struggling with rationalists and Jansenists; and Marquette University in Milwaukee around 1950. As the centuries pass, the schools adapt, keeping the basics and adding new tools. Leigh lists the elements of the Ratio which evolve, all of...