As confissões de S. Agostinho: retóricas da fé

• Autor(a) principal: Rosa, José M. Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/didaskalia.2007.1855

Without betraying itself, how can the truth of the faith be formulated in the public forum of other competing words? In this agoric and agonic condition the conviction of the faithfull individual (fides qua) and its communicable expression (fides quae) have to passe the hardest of tests: to become involved in the forum not of truth, but of verisimilitude, not of reality, but of appearance; not of dogma, but of doxa. The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo constitute one of the most successful expressions of this willing involvement of faith in the pluralistic forum of rhetoric. Conscious of the divides character of the word, Augustine himself confesses having been “a word salesman”; professional orators and their apprentices are no more than “sellers and buyers of grammar”. But in distinguishing «rhetoric at the service of error and lies”, pure “bartering of chatter”, from “rhetoric in the service of truth”, Augustine redirects rhetoric to the neutral place of organon and agrees to involve the reasons of christian existence in the forum of persuasion and verisimilitude, for it is not sufficient for truth to be true; it must also seem true, be verisimilar. Thus, the intimate truth of the word a faith can and shoud be expressed with eloquence and beauty, so “that it teaches, that it delights, that it moves”. And the result of this rhetorical criticism of rhetoric is the unparalleled work Confessions and its innumerable mises en scène within the ‘theatre of self’, in search of itself and of God, through the “vast palaces of memory”. But it is precisely there that the idolatrous pretensions of annexing God to the “experiences of self” are denounced.